How Do You End a Cult Series?: Fans Respond

I asked for your thoughts about how cult series should end and in particular your expectations and responses about the resolution of Smallville. Here are your responses: Hello:

Read the twitter from Allison, then read your blog. Very interesting stuff.

I watched Smallville at the beginning and kind of faded out when Jonathan died. I left it alone for a couple of years and picked it back up again in season 8. I've since watched all the episodes in order and truly love the series for so many reasons. The messages were so positive, family was important, good, truth, justice and all the things that we seem to be lacking or maybe I should say we're trying to uncover again.

I thought the end of the series was excellent. I truly was not disappointed other than learning it took another seven years for Clark to marry Lois. I'm not a comic book fan so I don't know what's happening in that reality. As far as Chloe goes, my impression was she was happily married to Oliver, she's a mother and she's still involved in the Justice League albeit in a role that keeps her anonymous for her protection and the team's. Given her propensity to stick by Clark no matter what, I can't imagine Chloe doing anything else with her life. It would have been nice for them to work Lana in there somehow. I wanted to know what happened to her but I wasn't disappointed per se.

Hope this is what you were looking for. I'm just so grateful not to have a St. Elsewhere or Dallas kind of ending.

As it was done, Smallville and Superman live on.

Happy writing!

Kim Kloes

Smallville fan

Prof. Jenkins,

Thanks for your recent blog post about Smallville's ending and more specifically, character Chloe Sullivan's ending. As a Chloe and Smallville fan myself, I've been engaged in some passionate discussions about this ever since the finale aired.

First of all, I was so happy to see Kelly Souders' statement about Chloe's career:

First I have to give a big "HUH?" to the Chloe part. As a woman who has a pretty demanding job and two children at home under the age of four, I have to say I was floored by that one. I'm not sure why anyone thought her reading a book at night meant she wasn't going to her computer down the hall to check in with the JLA.

This is precisely the point I have been making to people arguing the converse. We were shown nothing in the finale to contradict what had been established in "Fortune": that Chloe was going to be a reporter and a JLA headhunter/recruiter. Working mothers still read bedtime stories to their kids. How anyone could think that the Chloe we have been shown for the past 10 years would ever give up all her personal goals and career ambitions just because she became a mother is beyond me.

I know that some fans were disappointed that Oliver did not appear with Chloe in the scenes with their son, and it was not stated outright that the child WAS their son and they were still happily married. It seemed clear to me that Smallville was operating under some constraints from DCU and the producers still did their absolute level best to push those to the limit to show Chloe's happy ending: her prominent wedding rings, the child actor obviously cast for his resemblance to both Allison Mack and Justin Hartley; accessories in the child's bedroom including the bow and arrow set and the carpet decorated with targets (!).

I know there are Oliver/Dinah fans (and Chloe haters) who continue to argue that we don't know the child is Oliver's, they might be divorced despite the wedding rings, she might be married to someone else, etc. Some fans have claimed that a close-up screenshot of the envelope Chloe sent the blue ribbon to Lois in, postmarked from Singapore, with a return address of Chloe Sullivan (rather than Queen) is proof they are not married. Despite the fact that a happily-married Oliver called his wife "Sullivan" affectionately in the finale and it's been established that they both travel internationally for business and own a jet. Some posters on a SV fanboard pointed, apparently without irony, to a quick closeup of a supply locker at Watchtower containing both Oliver's and Dinah's equipment as proof that even in the SV-verse, they ended up together. (Yeah, I don't even know.) I guess what it boils down to is that some viewers need things spelled out very, very literally and concretely and specifically, and some of us are happy that the writers and producers actually trust the viewers NOT to need very heavy-handed expository dialogue to Get It.

As for where I'd like to see Chloe go in the future? Easy. The DCU reboot offers a unique opportunity to give Green Arrow a fresh start. Disgraced, isolated, divorced from Dinah, he really seems painted into a corner right now comics-wise. Why not do a reboot or at least a Smallville Alternate Universe spin-off with an Oliver Queen/Green Arrow who is younger, less of a bastard and has more possibilities for redemption? And all the better if a young reporter named Chloe Sullivan, already introduced in a Jimmy Olsen title, came along to verbally spar with him, tell him when he's being a jackass, and ultimately become something of a partner for him?

What I loved most about the Chloe/Oliver relationship is that they started out as teammates and friends first; knew everything about each other, both the good and the bad; weren't afraid to call each other on their crap; and still saw the hero in each other. They elevated each other; together they were more than the sum of their parts. Contrast that with comics Oliver cheating on Dinah repeatedly, having at least 2 out-of-wedlock children with other women, and the ultimate failure of their marriage. I don't like that Oliver Queen much, and thrilled as I was that Chloe was being introduced into the comics, I hated that it was in a Jimmy Olsen title, since the Smallville Chloe/Jimmy relationship was largely reviled by fandom. Give Chloe and Oliver a fresh start with each other in the comics, and let's see all the interesting new stories to be told.

Thanks again for the interesting topic--I plan to go back and read more now that I've found your blog.

--Susan

Hi Allison I have been watching Smallville since my dad had me watch it with him which was "Justice" in season 6 as my starting episode. It was awsome and I have loved your character ever since. And just between u and me I think chloe was more fun with Oliver then Jimmy. Besides the Finale what episode do u think u liked the most of the ones u were in for season 10? For ur role I think the best was probably "Masquerade with Desaad" but u looked like u had a lot of fun with "Fortune." What kinda props did u take home when the season ended? Did kristen and erica not like each other that much because after season 5 they actually (and i looked back) had only 6 scenes together in 2 whole seasons. Or was it the writers who did that? Im sorry if this is a little akward and u dont have to answer but i always wanted to know was it akward that u and tom knew each other for 9 years and u guys did a naked scene together in season 9 in "Escape"? With Silver Banshee? I think thats enough questions and I loved Smallville and I will always love it. I also was happy with Chloes ending being a recruiter of heros, a mom, and still a reporter. Your character always developed in fun ways and whats good is that it never changed it just kept adding on. Thanks, Justin your Smallville fan

My 1st response is about the show: The most awesome part about it is that, because of it's origins of Comic books, it already had it's core fan base; Those that weren't comic book geeks are more abstract/contemporary viewers.

I think with these 'types' of Shows, you have to stay true to the skeleton of the story line, though one can be creative with the flesh part, if I can put it in those terms. I don't mean to cast out the other viewers, their opinions count too (they add to the success), but because their perspective is more abstract/contemporary (where they want to change/challenge the very skeleton, I think there has to be that standard without apology, because then you disrespect the whole origin of the comic book storyline & it's genre (especially since the origin of the show is birthed from that, what an insult to the artist). It's always a bad idea to step on creative toes, or hands- lol!

If you want my honest opinion, opinions fluctuate so often, there is just no pleasing [everyone]. I think if the agenda is upfront in the beginning, eventually everyone will respect the outcome.

However, to alleviate the abstract/ contemp. crowd, I think there could've been a more consistent forum on the shows website. I think it lacked an online team specifically for that purpose (it's very time consuming). It could've used consistent interviews with the actors (both personal & the show), people like that personal connection, even if it was sharing one piece of personal information that isn't commonly known, along with the interview about the character on the show. You'd be surprised how most people are forgiving/fickle with their perspective if they like the interview & if they feel the actor was personable-Fans don't feel so "used"....and they forget they were upset. LOL!!

As for the continuation, wow! That you're even asking that question, cause in my opinion your heart & soul reflected your passion off screen! Wow! You could also sense the heart of the writers & basically everyone involved wanting to finish well. I think y'all (excuse the Texan in me-hehe) did the best you could.

I am curious though since the Chloe character was integrated into the comic's chorology, I wonder about the chain reaction in all the comics now? In Smallville the super heroes from the future came and said they never heard of her, How about now I wonder?

It would be cool to see THAT dynamic on a web series to start. Showing the ending of Smallville's "likeness", where Chloe is reading the book to the child as the beginning of the series (much like Clark being found as a child scene), whether the child that Chloe is reading to, is one she had with the Green Arrow, or the one that Green Arrow is supposed to have mentored and becomes "Speedy"(Red Arrow), his sidekick (a lot of content there in that relationship between Speedy & Green Arrow and how he grew from "Speedy" to "Red Arrow"). It would be great to see THAT Dynamic of the family type effort with the other Heroes: Ardimus (Arrowett) & Batman, Green Arrow was known to work them the most, on a show! I wouldn't cover the child growing up though, just that intro. (no one wants to see Chloe as a mom, just knowing she was) everyone knows she could do that & run a country from another galaxy. LOL! (Did I make sense? Sorta rambled in my brainstorm lol!)

I would love to see Chloe's part in the whole integration. Making Chloe a solid place to fit inn would be AWESOME! I think there is a pool of creativity yet to be discovered & written!!! I would LOVE!!! L-O-V-E- to take part in it's writing!!

I think it would do better as a web series, because of it's un-explored (to my knowledge) content. Man! It would be so killer!

love you woman!

Irene

Howdy,

Wow, you are a brave person, opening up your inbox to comments from a horde of Sci-Fi fans :)

I appreciate the opportunity to weigh in, so I'll keep my comments brief. I'll lead off my comments by pointing out that there's obviously no way they could have satisfied everyone with the finale, especially with a Canadian TV show budget. If you did everything all of the fans wanted, you'd spend a hundred million dollars, which was clearly not in the cards.

I also note that many folks appear to be quite satisfied with the finale. For my part, though, I found the finale to be monumentally unsatisfying, but not for the reasons that are being cited by many. My only expectation was that I expected the producers handling the finale to deliver a cohesive, meaningful story that wrapped up the TV series, its characters, and its plotlines during their last outing, and it is in this basic storytelling respect that it really came up short.

The best example of this fact is the way in which the Lois and Clark wedding was handled. The fact that Lois and her relationship with Clark was so important to his destiny was one of the truly innovative and memorable things about this season and a really novel, welcome addition of the Superman mythos; the storyline and accompanying great performances by the two actors really enhanced the show. They ultimately built up the wedding into one of the prime narrative drivers of the season, to the point where it took up half of the time in the series's final episode. The Lois and Clark wedding was, of course, also heavily hyped by the network. If you spend that much time building up to something, you have raised audience expectations to the point where you really, really, need to cohesively deliver a satisfying resolution onscreen.

Instead, the wedding gets interrupted at the halfway point to the show, we get to the end of the final episode, there's a brief 7-year flash forward sequence, and the two main characters still aren't married. As a viewer, my response to that moment was roughly: "WHAT?!!! Are you kidding me? All that buildup and this is what we get?"

The fact that the ending of the show establishes that they are still trying to get married is really just a bad storytelling decision. It rudely snaps the viewer out of the story. This ending raises a host of uncomfortable questions that the viewer really shouldn't have been induced to ask, since they completely ruin the "suspension of disbelief" that is absolutely required for a show with an (admittedly zany) premise like this one.

Questions like: Why didn't they just finish the wedding in the parking lot with the minister 7 years before? Why did it take so long for them to try to get married again? More importantly, why haven't Superman and Lois Lane, of all people, not been able to find a day--or heck, even an hour--in seven years to finish their 90% done wedding, which had been portrayed as immensely important to them both for an entire season? You make time for what's important, and waiting seven years is very much out of character for them.

The Lois character in particular goes from "never accepting defeat" just two episodes prior to apparently blithely accepting defeat in the case where her own wedding doesn't get finished. Bottom line: the whole thing just defies belief, and having a prime narrative focus of the series be handled in this fashion really makes no sense.

What makes it even more frustrating is that there are any number of ways this plotline could have been handled more satisfyingly; I for one would have been A-OK if that last scene had just established that they were were married offscreen at some nebulous point beforehand, which would have been shockingly easy to do (a simple "Hello, Mrs. Kent" would have worked just fine...). Instead, although we did get lots of wedding-related character moments and the ending clearly shows that the two characters are still together, the viewers categorically did not get a satisfying onscreen narrative conclusion to the season-long wedding plotline. You spend that much time building up to something, you have to deliver, and they did not.

It would be interesting to hear about the thinking that went into this decision; to a completely average TV viewer such as myself, it is absolutely befuddling, and I just felt insulted by the way that the wedding plotline was handled. It felt like my time had been wasted for an entire season.

Now, I don't know if the non-wedding was mandated by the studio or was a misguided effort to leave the viewer "wanting more", but no matter whose responsibility it is, it was a huge mistake to end that plotline (and the show) in such a nonsensical and unsatisfying manner, especially when handling it in a more straightforward and crowd-pleasing way would have been just as easy and let them tell the same story.

The completely illogical conclusion to the wedding plotline is emblematic of other, similar problems in the finale, like (for example) the bizarre Chloe-and-the-comic book framing story that gives away Clark's identity already noted by many, as well as the fact that (despite two seasons of some pretty thick foreshadowing) we never get to see Lois name Superman and reveal him to the world, a fairly important and defining moment for both characters.

In the cosmic scheme of things, of course, it doesn't really matter. Griping about the final episode is of course a symbolic gesture at this point since the show is over, we'll never see the actors in these roles ever again, and everyone (myself included) is moving on.

But, that's just why I think some people remain frustrated. The producers apparently took the position "We don't need to show [insert really important Smallville character milestone here] on our TV show, since we all know from [insert comic book or movie here] that it will eventually happen!". Well, that's just lazy.

As a fan of the TV show, I wanted to see these iconic story moments with "our" versions of these characters, and that's what the viewers really didn't get. I had always held off buying the Smallville DVDs, because I knew there would inevitably be a big box set at the end of the series, and I knew that for me the payoff from the destination (the finale) had to be worth making the journey. Let's face it, this show had some real clunkers along the way.

Unfortunately, the final episode (and in particular, that final scene, where the two main characters are inexplicably not married after a whole season of buildup) was such a let down that I'm not going to waste my time and hard-earned money on the DVDs in order to relive a journey that has such an unsatisfying destination. Which is kind of a shame.

Thanks again for the opportunity to offer an opinion! I don't mind if you utilize the preceding paragraphs for public consumption, but I would request that my identity remain anonymous.

Cheers,

Samuel Lawrence

I am a huge Smallville, Superman fan and have been from day one. I am also

involved heavily in the online fandom on various sites including Twitter and Kryptonsite forums so I have a very good idea of how the Finale of Smallville was perceived. Generally, I've only come across a small minority who didn't enjoy the finale for various reasons and unfortunately these people are also the most vocal.

Many people loved the episode, myself including. I couldn't have think of a more perfect way to end the show after 10 years. Clark Kent, the boy who was so scared of being alone finally became the man he was destined to be with the woman he loves by his side. The show is about Clark Kent, not Chloe or Lex and he was the reason I watched from beginning to end.

The only thing that offended me was having Chloe being the only one to call him 'Superman' by name. I waited till the end to hear Lois call him that so I was disappointed. In my opinion, only Lois deserves that.

I don't have a problem with the way they ended Chloe's storyline. It was ambiguous, yes but that's what makes it interesting. For those that want it, they can imagine her and Ollie married, in love and happy. My scenario for Chloe would be to have her successfully raising her son away from the heroes and carving a life for herself outside it all. For too long, she's been defined by the heroes that surround her and sacrificed so much of herself to their cause. Working for JLA doesn't make her successful. She could be a

editor, painter, journalist and be more powerful, successful because success comes with inner happiness and strength in what you do.

Since I was a little girl, Lois Lane has always been my favourite character. I wouldn't love her any less if she wasn't the Pulitzer winning reporter that she is. Her character, integrity, her never-ending faith in others is what draws me to her.

With shows, movies, books - there is always controversy to who belongs to who and the right way to end characters. You're never going to satisfy everyone. When JK Rowling ended her 7th Harry Potter book, there were people who said it was the worst book written but it doesn't make it any less a work of brilliance. But such is life that the negatives always get the focus over the positives.

I wanted to use this opportunity to thank everyone involved with the Smallville and for 10 years of love, laughter, tears and magic.

*Anon*

I wish I could write a logic piece analyzing bit by bit how the writers broke the contract with the audience they established in the pilot.

I'm a writer myself (in Spanish, English is not my first language as you probably can tell in my bad grammar) and I studied for years creative writing, plot points, chekhov guns, the journey of the hero and the heroine....so many other treaties about the art of writing and if the writers really think they did their job I pity any new fans that engage into their projects because they lack basic storytelling skills.

But I can't. I'm still mourning.

The connection the first five years created with this characters and me was strong and powerful, and it was downhill from them on and in the end they just destroyed it, to a point that all I can feel is rage thinking about it. I wish I could be more rational about it, is just a TV show that no one will remember in 10 years (maybe because of the horrible ending), but I can't.

I was in love with Smallville.

I usually call it my only abusive relationship, always believing the promise that the good times will come back and kept coming back for more mistreatment almost every week, like a beating husband that brings you flowers and promises not to hurt you again and you forgive because you are in love, but then the beatings continue coming and in the end you end up dead.

This is what Smallville did to me. It killed my faith on TV series.

I will say I haven't seen any other series and I don't plan to, I can't have faith again. Heroes started great and also ended in a mess, and the perfect TV series Pushing Daisies was canceled. There are many other great series that also suffered the same faith so is obvious that TV shows are stale like Hollywood movies are becoming now with nothing new or original just rehash, unlikeable characters and bad writing that they cannot see it for the life of themselves.

I really hope the producers of Smallville are really happy about being part of the many problems I have with TV that lead me to quit it altogether. For as much as they say this is the planned ending for the last 10 years I would love to see the original planned ended script or layout, I'm pretty sure it was totally different.

As for my kids I will be buying DVD of good TV shows of the past for them to actually enjoy watching good stories. Star Trek TNG for example, also finished in its own terms and their ending was perfect, IMO. It got closure for all the characters, gave us a glimpse of the future that was logical for them in most ways and opened new possibilities, organically integrating even the special guests....just perfection in writing.

But new TV shows and cable networks can keep airing bad written shows and Reality TV 24/7 if they want to. This viewer, that was willing to purchase the special 10 seasons package of Smallville if only the ending would had been...decent, Is going to take her disposable income and investing on good stories and people that are willing to actually do their homework and keep their promises, YMMV as usual.

Thanks again for the chance and who knows I might be able to write something proper in the future, at this point I just can't.

Ana Bastow

Editor's Note: Thanks to everyone (whether fan or professional) who took the time to share with me your thoughts on Smallville's ending or on the ending of cult series more generally. There were many different and sometimes conflicting perspectives expressed here, and it's worth remembering the range of production contingencies and restrictions which also figure into this process.

I've always contended that cult series are often most satisfying in the middle when these diverse sets of expectations can all be put into play and where fans feel free to speculate and generate a range of possible endings through their conversations which open the series to many diferent potential interpretations. The minute a series starts to close down, some of those possibilities will be rejected and some heavily invested fans will be crushed. In part, this is because even though fans ultimately play a huge role in how a series will be remembered, fans ascribe much greater value to canon, the officially generated storyline, than fanon, their own interpretations, speculations, fantasies, and productions.

Another theme here that interested me a lot was the sense that the ending determines the value of the series. My own views as a fan are rather different. I know I've been disappointed in the resolution of certain series but it also doesn't take that much away from the pleasures I had in the process of the series. If I had a series which had 100 plus great episodes and a bad ending, I'd be rewatching and remembering fondly the 100 great episodes, which was my primary experience of the series, and if my frustration was too high, tossing the disc of the final episode. Fan communities as a whole have developed purposeful amnesia, denying the existance of plot twists which they disliked, and writing their fan fiction starting just before the plot twist occurs. Blake's 7 fandom developed a whole genre of fan fiction involving writing beyond an ending which many found frustrating (though which I found especially provocative and clearly, given the number of stories fans wrote, generative.) We need put only as much weigh on the ending of the series as we chose to in our personal and collective imagination, and for me at least, a bad ending doesn't take that much away from the experience I had with the series as a whole.

Thanks again to our friends at the Alchemists for helping us to organize this exchange between fans and producer/actress.

Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part Two (Anne Kustritz, Louisa Stein, and Sam Ford)

In this second installment, the participants engage in back and forth conversation intended to extend upon the ideas contained in their opening statements. Louisa Stein: Anne and Sam, I'm struck by the harmony in our three separately written pieces. We all seem to recognize the perceived dangers or negative connotations of the term acafan, and yet feel a value in holding on to the term because of its potential as a self-reflexive signpost, a bridge between interconnected disciplines or subject positions, and even perhaps a politicized position.

One question I have is from where this perception emerges that acafan is an essentialized standpoint or identity connected to identity politics? All of our three responses here indicate that that none of us relate to the term acafan in this way, though we are all wary of these associations. Why and where does this negative perception of acafan as a divisive concept take root and how can we counter this narrative? Or is this perception an unavoidable part of the project of acafan work?

Anne Kustritiz:My concern stems from the universalizing tendency behind the aca-fan construct, when one might be tempted to lose sight of aca-fan as a discursive marker and act as though it identifies some kind of shared experience. Several times in the past (and perhaps in this discussion's future as well) I've seen dismissals of the aca-fan concept because it fails to account for that individual's lived experience, often either because of a mismatch in object (i.e. what kind of fans), discipline, or method. If fandom only refers to participation in active face-to-face communities, many of our colleagues would not qualify. If aca-fan relates only to those who directly interact with fans during the course of their studies, likewise many may see the concept as irrelevant. Partly, this may result from the preponderance of aca-fen from community-oriented fandom who use and reflect on the label, which sometimes makes it seem as though the concept only applies to them (not necessarily by ideology or design, but by sheer numbers).

Particularly for those engaged in literary analysis, aca-fan terminology may seem like an unwelcome imposition of social sciences concerns, and it could be useful to consider how reflections on the researcher's identity might still offer enrichment for those who see themselves pursuing primarily archival or textual work.

For me, identifying as an aca-fan certainly incorporates a political stance because of my object, method, and disciplinary position: for example, identifying with and as my work identifies me as queer, and copy-left, among other things (which is not to say all slash participants identify as such, but these are strong associations). However, aca-fan describes only one aspect of my fan, scholarly, and other identities and experiences, and it would not mark other scholars in the same way (an aca-fan doing textual analysis of wrestling fans' twitter accounts would find that telling academic colleagues about personal interest in wrestling and telling wrestling fans about discourse analysis have very different stakes and consequences than my positionality).

Even the suggestion that the term "aca-fan" always offers a relevant and contradictory identification to some extent implies a false universal. In cultural anthropology, for instance, the relevant term would be native anthropology, which does not offer a new or challenging intervention into existing disciplinary practice, but rather adds to an established field of study. Film scholars who also make films or passionately follow film similarly go without notice. However, even in both of these instances, their positionality also shifts if one begins to term them "fans" of urban youth culture, Portuguese jazz bar culture, Hitchcock, or horror. While the experience and passion may remain the same whether we are scholars, buffs, aficionados, or fans, the social positioning alters significantly, thus opening the possibility for solidarity (often with class implications) through fan identification.

Sam Ford: In Soap Fans in 1995, Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby made compelling points about the necessary balance between private and social fandom. I agree with Anne that, just as fan studies has often privileged the fan community over private consumption practices, the term "acafan" has come to hold particular meaning to participants in a community. The implications that being an acafan might have for those doing textual analysis, for instance, is strong.

I primarily study (and am a fan of) areas of entertainment whose cultural value is often missed by anyone who would not consider themselves a fairly ardent "fan" of the genre in question: soap operas and pro wrestling. From the "outside," both are often considered of no artistic merit, and the trouble that fans of either genre find is that even explaining the artistry of the genre or what makes for "good" vs. "bad" wrestling or "quality soap opera storytelling" is lost on someone outside the genre.

I remember in particular, after the cancellation of As the World Turns, being interviewed by a television critic for a prominent publication about the death of long-running soap operas. I was explaining what was unique about the soap opera storytelling model and what might be lost as daytime soaps go off the air. In the interview, she could detect from my passion and the depth of my knowledge that I did more than "study" soap fans or write "about" the genre: the "fan" side of my "acafan" was showing through. I could instantly tell that her radar went up. As she detected that I liked what she saw as lowbrow and lower-grade programming, she began to completely dismiss all that I had to say. After I finished, she said, "I've watched soap operas before, and I didn't see any of what you saw."

My point was exactly that: that the language of soap opera and the ability to see what DEFINES "good storytelling" and high quality texts within the soap opera genre can only be seen by someone who understands the genre deeply enough to know its lexicon. And, similarly, for soaps, I've written before about the fact that doing textual analysis for that genre (with 260 new episodes a year, for decades) is so complex that it's hard for those who aren't intimately familiar for the genre to follow and not see it as totally ridiculous.

All this is to say that, for textual analysis in genres like these, being an acafan provides a great wealth of experience and understanding of a genre that those who aren't dedicated viewers just wouldn't have. So I certainly believe that we too often, in using the term "acafan," privilege the social side of "fan" without thinking about the "aca" part.

And part of what we are questioning here, I suppose, is whether "acafan" becomes a label for a scholar's relative position to an object of study; a mode of engagement with particular methodologies and approaches; or a label for a distinct kind of scholar or a sub-field of work under "fan studies." Sometimes, there seems to be slippage across these uses.

Louisa Stein: Anne, I want to focus in on a very valuable point in your response that I'd like us to unpack further. You wrote: "Even the suggestion that the term 'aca-fan' always offers a relevant and contradictory identification to some extent implies a false universal."

This strikes me as very significant; I didn't mean to imply that there's always a contradiction between the academic and fan positions, but rather that they always exist in relation to each other, but what that relation is is in constant motion, and for me personally my acafan positioning pushes me to constantly probe at that relationship, to expore whether it is one of solidarity or conflict or more likely a mix and match of contradictory and aligned values.

So for example in going to Vividcon, or in my approach to vidding more generally, I come with a strange mesh of aesthetic values as a film scholar who has studied both mainstream and experimental film and as (perhaps resultingly) a fan who appreciates both highly polished vids by the most acclaimed vidders within fandom and vids that circulate in other spheres on youtube and don't adhere to the same vidding value sets. So to me the one universal that the acafan position brings with it is the need for a constant self reflexivity in regards to considering one's relation to one's object. Maybe that's why acafandom for me can encompass personal fans, anti-fans, community fans, and everything in between.

And this connects with your final comment, Sam, which I think also gets right to the heart of things. You write that "part of what we are questioning here, I suppose, is whether 'acafan' becomes a label for a scholar's relative position to an object of study; a mode of engagement with particular methodologies and approaches; or a label for a distinct kind of scholar or a sub-field of work under 'fan studies.' Sometimes, there seems to be slippage across these uses."

Yes, and yes, and I think that perhaps the problem comes in when that slippage goes unnoticed--or rather, where we move from slippage (which could be productive if it is recognized as such) and conflation. When these three elements become conflated or equated, we do have a vast narrowing of what one might understand as acafan, a narrowing that could easily become quite alienating. So how do we (or can we) rescue the term acafan to mean all three of these elements (among others) in tandem and multiplicity, rather than as a overly-simplified unified front?

Anne Kustritz: I agree that allowing for a variety of life experiences and disciplinary approaches to populate the aca-fan concept is the primary challenge. Partly, this may require that a case be made for what self-reflexivity has to offer, in tandem with the importation or creation of methods for critically evaluating aca-fan self-reflexivity, because as with any mode of writing, some authors will offer more nuanced, sophisticated, and productive analyses than others.

In the first case, this blog conversation will hopefully amplify the diversity of experiences and approaches taken by aca-fen, which will hopefully allow for all of us to be in broader conversation with the field as a whole. In the second instance, the aca-fan concept will be defined by perhaps the most simplistically "confessional" works unless we create a theoretical frame for understanding and evaluating how scholars employ self-reflexivity to separate justifications of the aca-fan concept from the success with which it is employed in various pieces.

Perhaps this addresses Sam's concern about the relatively unexamined "aca" end of things. As I've mentioned, because of my background in cultural anthropology, I tend to draw upon that literature for its specialization in analyzing the researcher-participant relationship, but it would likely behoove us to collectively build a literature of our own specifically on the process of scholarly analysis for aca-fan works. Thus, perhaps instead of questioning whether one ought to be an aca-fan, which as a question of identity and identification seems problematic to police, and instead move toward creating principles for thinking through aca-fan works. Which aspects of an aca-fan text make it more or less successful or useful?

Sam Ford:I think both of your suggestions are key here and get back to one of my concerns of what would be lost if the ideas surrounding "aca-fan" were to be lost: a space for academics from a wide range of traditional disciplines to come together to share work that both study fans/fan communities in a way that shows respect, nuance, and an acknowledgment of autonomy for those fans--and a space that allows for the intersection of academics and fans to converse with one another on high-level concepts surrounding the reception and socialization of texts that draw high levels of engagements from their viewers/listeners/readers/players.

There has been compelling work in the past few years to, for instance, look at the intersections (or lack thereof) in work about sports fandom and media fandom. I think we should always strive to continue expanding the inclusivity of fan studies, and part of that requires--to Anne's point--drawing together collections of methodologies, "best practices," etc., of what constitutes using an "aca-fan" methodology or including an "aca-fan" positioning of one's own relationship to a work. This doesn't necessarily require too much formalization--treating fan studies as a discipline all its own in ways that puts too much rigidity for an area study which I believe is all the richer because it crosses disciplinary bounds. But I think it does require being able to present grad students, undergrads, fans, and young scholars with ideas of what constitutes an "acafan" mode of engagement.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

Anne Kustritz will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Amsterdam in Media Studies as of fall 2011, after teaching in Women and Gender Studies at the College at Brockport, SUNY. Her work focuses on slash fan fiction, internet ethnography, and queer reproductive politics. Her articles include "Slashing the Romance Narrative" and "Postmodern Eugenics" (forthcoming), and she sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. Anne is a fan of Michele Foucault, baking, fruit forward red wines, Ani DiFranco, hatha yoga, sustainable agriculture, Ruth Behar, international travel, and fan creative works, among many other things.

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom Strategic Communications, an affiliate with both the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment group. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company. Sam is co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (NYU Press, forthcoming) and is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures. You can find Louisa on twitter here and on wordpress here..

Acafandom and Beyond: Week One, Part One (Anne Kustritz, Louisa Stein, and Sam Ford)

This is the first installment of our summer-long discussion of "Acafandom and Beyond." Many readers ask me what "Acafan" means in the title of this blog. This conversation will be a chance to dig deeper into this concept and explore its relationship to more general concerns of the place of subjectivity and self-reflexivity in cultural critique. In the first segment of each week, we will be reading opening statements from the three invited participants. Anne Kustritz: My interest in aca-fan identity derives from two main concerns. First, I envision the aca-fan construct as the demarcation of a site of cultural and political struggle and an opportunity for solidarity; yet it often seems to be represented as a coherent or even essentialized standpoint or identity (and identity politics). Secondly, the issues I imagine as most central to theorization of aca-fan identity have also been elucidated significantly in the works of post-structuralist, post-modern, feminist, queer, post-colonial, and native ethnography/ethnology, and those conversations would significantly enrich our dialogue.

It seems to me that arguments about or discussions of aca-fan identity often work at cross-purposes because they reveal the lack of a shared object and method: that is, the material incoherency/heterogeneity of both the "fan" and the "studies" of fan studies; basic disagreement about the organization and definition of these terms means that scholars (and fans) discussing aca-fan identity lack a shared vocabulary. The stakes involved in embracing, repudiating, or entirely avoiding the aca-fan construct remain localized within particular geographical and institutional spaces. Thus, the conversation looks almost entirely different depending upon which fans one studies, using which methods. For example, in my own work I've tried to make a distinction between "creative" and "as is" fans who either treat the canon as open to fan transformation, or a closed system to be interpreted and commented upon but not altered. In past aca-fan discussions I've also come to see the critical importance of studying enculturated versus unincorporated fans as a locus of disagreement, i.e. those fans who participate in communities and define themselves through that participation, and those who act within a less fixed network, or none at all.

Both of these distinctions as well as numerous others repeatedly unseat our attempts to determine who is a fan, and thus what may be gained or lost by identifying as such. Subsequently, the methods one uses to study "their" type of fans also structures beliefs about the aca-fan concept, particularly between those who see fans as primarily a textual phenomena and those who see fans as a primarily socio-cultural phenomena, as well as those who balance the two perspectives. Even then, significant disagreement still persists over whether fans primarily pose artistic, psychological, cultural, legal, or political questions. Our investments in who defines a fan, how they should be studied, and why we study fans all become ventriloquized in discussions about the value and nature of aca-fan identification. In other words, a little self-reflexivity about our thoughts on self-reflexivity might be in order.

Secondly, our discussion of aca-fan identity occurs in the wake of two decades of debate in cultural anthropology about the trials and tribulations of studying a group to which one belongs, as well as over a century of thought on the unique political, ethical, and psychological implications of studying people. While it may seem strange to turn to anthropology, especially to those who study unincorporated, "as is" fans, it would behoove us to take these conversations into account and allow them to enrich our dialogue. We need not invent this wheel. Just as a sample, post-structuralist anthropology, particularly the works of James Clifford, warn against allowing our observations of some behavior of one group of people to construct a coherent, ahistorical, or essencialized notion of "culture" - or "fans." Rather, it is through the act of naming and narrating both our participants and ourselves as fans that these scattered activities seem homogenous and inherently meaningful.

Ruth Behar's work, thought by many to mark the beginning of cultural anthropology's self-reflexive turn, deeply probes the layers of hierarchy and difference at play when the life story of a researcher comes into contact with the on-going life stories of her group of interest. She notes that while self-narratives of the heroic, self-determined researcher feel reassuring, it is more honest and affords deeper human connections with participants and readers to acknowledge our fallibility and partiality while engaging in what she terms "vulnerable observation."

Similarly, many critical ethnographers, including Gelya Frank, Gayle Rubin, and Kamala Visweswaran, argue that doing work within our own communities does not resolve the inherited colonial and class based baggage inherent in "studying down," but rather often intensifies them because one begins to study the very system of hierarchy within which one's own life remains entangled.

Scholars like Julie Taylor who use ethnographic methods at the disciplinary margins challenge us to reconceptualize the value of academic work by refusing to mystify its necessary partiality, limitations, and personal/somatic origins, instead celebrating the inescapable fact that academic work comes from unique subjectivities. Thus Taylor describes her work as "her tango," and makes the specific enunciation (rather than inherent nature) of Argentine tango danced by herself and her participants as inflected by the widespread terror of the dirty war and the gendered terror of sexual abuse the very focus and strengths of her study. In general, critical cultural anthropologists, ethnographers, and ethnologists offer a long literature problematizing the culture concept, probing the construction of researchers' identities both "in the field," and at home, as well as while doing "homework," and imagining a type of scholarship not based on the false empiricisms of absolute, essential, or ahistorical knowledge.

Therefore, I find it important to start by stating that I study enculturated, creative fans using an interdisciplinary array of mixed methods including critical theory and ethnography. My feelings about the aca-fan concept are thereby conditioned by my training in both cultural studies and critical cultural anthropology. I am wary of allowing the aca-fan construction to imply any homogeneity of culture or identity construction among either fans or academics, and instead find it most useful as the description of a site of struggle between the dominant constructions of each, pointing toward many disciplines' remaining investments in "objectivity," and the social stereotype of "the fan" as masculine yet emasculated, overly emotional yet analytic and socially inept, educated yet enraptured with the detritus of the popular.

Although I emphasize the heterogeneity of experience and investment among the group and my own idiosyncratic place therein, I identify as a slash fan and an aca-fan because these are labels of solidarity for me. Like queer, these offer an opportunity to claim and stand with a set of socially marked investments in sex, sociality, research practice, and classed cultural tastes.

Louisa Stein This August I will be going to my first fan convention. It's a very specific fan con, not one that is focused on any particular series, but rather a con that brings together practitioners and appreciators of the practice of fan remix video known as vidding. The con is called Vividcon, and for three days fans and vidders gather to screen vids, discuss vids, assess vids, critique vids, and dance to vids.

Vividcon represents a turning point for me, as does the writing of this piece. I have always found negotiating my fan and academic personae to be a fraught process. As a result I have steered away from directly sharing my fannish narratives or experiences in academic contexts and vice versa. Indeed, for a long time I maintained not one or two but four online journaling spaces, including an academic blog, a fannish journal, a personal journal, and an acafannish journal. In recent years I've begun to question whether this level of split personality management might be the healthiest thing, and so I've worked to bring together these different dimensions of my cultural participation.

Vividcon will be the first embodied experiential union of these two sets of perspective, both of which I claim as mine. Not that I'm going to go in waving academic credentials--indeed, I am as worried about negative fan response to the "aca" part as I am about academics to the "fan" part (a worry that is perhaps exaggerated, as I am certainly not the only academic attending the conference, and there is in fact a workshop being held on academic work on vidding).

But regardless of my own uneasiness, if I'm going to Vividcon, I am going as myself, and that means as a fan, a vidder, and an academic, in no particular order. These positions may seem distinct and contradictory, but when I poke at them I find they are not; I produce both as an academic and as a vidder, but in one case I create with words alone, the other with music and image. And crucially, in both cases I engage in dialogue with others who similarly care about thinking in sustained ways about media, media culture, and media reception.

The term "acafan" in all its messiness suggests an unexpected and in many cases uneasy (and from some perspectives, unwanted) combination. The aca side conveys notions of academic knowledge--knowledge of and by the academy--knowledge hashed out in peer reviewed journals and modes of thought schooled in classrooms and conferences, sustained, rigorous, tested knowledge. The fan side brings (overtly) to the table investment, fantasy, unabashed emotion, focus and devotion, abashed emotion, consumer willingness, consumer un-willingness, consumer anger, mainstream engagement with popular culture, non-mainstream engagement in popular culture, de-centered authorship, online peer culture, visible female authorship, queer engagement.

My dual allegiance to both sides has forced me to realize from the start that this uneasy synthesis of perspectives is part of my position as a media scholar and as a media lover and as a fan. In the end I believe this dynamic of productive tension or uneveness isn't relevant only to people who identify as fans and academics, but to academics who study culture more broadly.

Maybe acafan is an imperfect and now loaded term, but any term that gets at this dual, conflicted union will accumulate baggage because of the nature of the concept, and this one has a specific history and history of scholarship that I would be loathe to erase in an attempt to get away from problems that are, from another perspective, core strengths, contradictions and all.

The concept and term "acafan" do not in themselves offer an answer: far from it. Rather they lead us always to key questions: how do I balance investment and critical analysis, how do we usefully acknowledge our particular positioning in relation to a given text or community, and what insights come from a given situated position (be it casual observer, lurker, personal fan, fan-creator, community participant, antifan)? I (and I am sure I am not alone in this) face these questions as part of an ongoing process, and the questions change along with the community contexts, media texts, and my investment. Thus to me "acafan" is not a category of scholar or a defined community, nor even a fixed position, but rather a descriptor of an ongoing, ever shifting critical and personal process.

Sam Ford: Over the past few years, the term "acafan" has been picked up for a variety of uses. For academics, it's been a way to discuss a particular type of fan studies. By that, I mean pieces more qualitative in nature, more informed by in-depth knowledge of a particular fan culture because it's been written by someone who is a member of that community, and which often use an inductive sort of logic, focusing on the rich details of a particular fan community and then looking at what that case might tell us about fan practices at large.

It's also become a way to be more up-front about one's own complicity in what he is writing about (as Anne discusses), encouraging academics to both admit the limitations their "embeddedness" causes but also to be able to draw from the knowledge they have as a participant of some sort in a particular fandom or as a self-professed "fan" of a media property.

But, of course, both "academic" and "fan" are loaded terms. There's plenty of anti-fandom in academic culture (as Louisa alludes to), which the "acafan" has been a construct to rail against. And there's plenty of anti-egghead feelings in fan culture, both conceptual (not seeing the value in "overanalyzing" or questioning the "privileged"/heightened position an academic is perceived to be taking on) and based on real experience (for any of us who have ever ran into an "acafan" who believes their fannish opinion "superior" because they are "not just a fan but also an academic.")

As fan communities face members who see their positions as enlightened because of their "superior" knowledge--and as academic conferences, programs, and journals are flooded with people who see fan studies as a justification to make a living writing about their hobby without worrying so much about any critical intervention or generating compelling insights--it's perhaps no surprise that the term has "grown" to the point that people are now questioning whether its use has been stretched past usefulness.

Hence, we have this series over the summer here on Henry's blog: what I hope will be a helpful intervention to figure out what can't be lost about the position, methodology, and type of writing/discussion implied by the "acafan" construct while hopefully helping weed out ways that the term has come to be used in counterproductive ways.

While I don't have deep investment in whether the actual term "acafan" is retained, I do have reservations about what could be lost in abandoning the term. As Anne points out, there is a lack of boundaries in fan studies that is both freeing (being able to draw from multiple disciplines/methodologies and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration) and constraining (a lack of shared vocabulary, etc.) But, even as we celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of fan studies, I think it's crucial to think about all the areas of what might be considered "fan studies" which our field has not intersected with: sports studies and music/folklore studies, for instance, both of which are areas where many of the academics writing in these areas likely have deep personal/social investments in their objects of study. The "acafan" construct still might act as a means through which we can connect many academics who "fan studies" as a "field" has not yet intersected with.

Even more fundamentally, I fear a dismissal of "acafandom" outright might miss opportunities for collaboration, conversation and debate between fan studies academics and fan communities members who deeply invested in larger discussions about fandom, the politics of affinity communities, etc. I feel that the idea of "acafandom" have come to represent spaces of collaboration where academics studying fandom can learn from fans and vice versa, and I've participated in a variety of conversations, online and in-person, that have been strengthened by collaborative discussion between those who study fandom professionally and those who primarily approach fandom through "vernacular theory" (to borrow Thomas McLaughlin's term).

As someone with a deep investment in "applied humanities" (to use a popular term from my alma mater, MIT), I long to see an academia more inclusive of a diverse range of "non-academic" opinions, just as I long to see the insights of media studies academics reach audiences outside journal readership and media studies conference attendees. For me, acafandom has represented sites for such collaboration, and I feel that fan studies loses significant ground if we accidentally raze spaces for interdisciplinary and academic/fan dialogue in reconsidering our use of the term.

We invite your comments and contributions over on our mirror site here or send comments to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and be sure to indicate if they are for publication.

Anne Kustritz will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at The University of Amsterdam in Media Studies as of fall 2011, after teaching in Women and Gender Studies at the College at Brockport, SUNY. Her work focuses on slash fan fiction, internet ethnography, and queer reproductive politics. Her articles include "Slashing the Romance Narrative" and "Postmodern Eugenics" (forthcoming), and she sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. Anne is a fan of Michele Foucault, baking, fruit forward red wines, Ani DiFranco, hatha yoga, sustainable agriculture, Ruth Behar, international travel, and fan creative works, among many other things.

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy with Peppercom Strategic Communications, an affiliate with both the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Popular Culture Studies Program at Western Kentucky University, and a fellow with the Futures of Entertainment group. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company. Sam is co-author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society (NYU Press, forthcoming) and is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the Flow TV anthology (Routledge, 2011). Louisa is co-editor of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008), and of the forthcoming collection Transmedia Sherlock. Louisa is also Book Review editor of Transformative Works and Cultures. You can find Louisa on twitter here and on wordpress here..

Going Beyond the Ending: A Wrap Up

This week, this blog has been using the debate about Smallville's ending to raise some larger questions about how cult series ends and how producers might deal with fans who are disappointed or frustrated or enraged or betrayed or... with the outcomes. Seeking to place this debate in a larger context, I reached out to Flourish Klink,who graduated with a Masters from the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (where I was her proud mentor) and now, alongside teaching at MIT, works as the Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, advising this transmedia company about fan relations and participatory culture. She always has interesting things to say about the interplay between producers and fans, so I wanted to give her a chance to weigh in on this discussion. Cult series always seem more satisfying to fans in the middle than at the end. How do you think producers should deal with the expectations which have built up over the run of the series? Are there classic mistakes which producers make in trying to respond to fan frustration with the ending of a program?

One of the most important aspects of dealing with expectations is to be honest about the situation, the possibilities, and the fact that not everybody is happy. One of the most classic mistakes that producers make is to become very defensive about their own work, suggesting that the way the show (or book, or...) ended is the only way it could have ended. Obviously, producers and writers and actors get just as wrapped up in their own long-running projects as fans do, so sometimes they become very certain that they're doing the right thing!

But fans also have a perspective on the series, and if the producers are too staunch that the series ended the right and correct and only way possible, it can be very insulting to fans. It is much better to frame discussion about the end of a series in a more open way. "We decided to make character X and character Y together, because that's what everybody in the writer's room was feeling... Character Y and character Z might have a romance in an alternate universe, for sure, but we could only tell one of a million possible stories about these people."

An example of a writer who dealt with this very badly is J.K. Rowling (OK, she's a writer, not a producer - but it's a similar idea). Many fans viewed the epilogue to the final book as a slap in the face, intended to shut down any speculation about what might happen to the characters in their adult life. It would have been very easy for Rowling to mitigate some of those frustrations with a few well-placed words!

What roles can/should transmedia play in shaping the future of a cult series?

Transmedia can provide a wonderful way to explore the future of a series that ended too soon - but it can also play a wonderful role in exploring alternate universes, alternate ideas of how characters could be. That's an old idea in fanfic, but it's a new idea for Hollywood. (Here, we ignore the Star Wars extended universe - it's been doing this for years, but very quietly.) On its simplest level, changing media can allow fans who liked the ending of a TV show to enjoy that ending and consider the new medium "noncanonical" - but it can allow fans who didn't like the ending, especially an ending that centers around a romantic pairing, to continue the story until it reaches a place they find more satisfying.

What roles can/should fan fiction play in allowing fans to "repair the damage" done by the "Powers That Be" when they end a series on what some fans feel is the wrong note?

It seems silly to me to ask questions about "should" when it comes to fan works. Fan works are not really the kind of thing that "should" or "should not" exist - they do exist, and there we are. That said, I think that fan fiction is vital for this purpose. Fans are extremely invested in their shows, and fan fiction can be a way to put your money where your mouth is: instead of just saying "damn, why didn't they do X, Y and Z," you can write it yourself instead. By that stage of a show, fandom is often as much about frustration as it is about fascination; fan fiction gives one a way to work out both those emotions.

What franchises do you think have done the best job in resolving the competing expectations that surround the final episode of a favorite series?

Even though lots of fans disliked the final season, I think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a very good job - and it did a good job of using multiple shows and multiple media to let fans choose what view of the universe they wanted to take. Fans can choose to only watch Buffy - or also watch Angel - or also read the Season 8 comic books. Depending on what they chose to do, what they choose to consider their own personal "head canon," they can enjoy their own ideas about the series. What's more, whether you liked or disliked the final episode of BTVS, nobody was able to say that it wasn't climactic. BTVS somehow managed to have an apocalypse every season and still raise the stakes every season. If that's possible, no other show has an excuse for not having a climactic final episode!

For those who want to have a better understanding of how one can be a fan, even a very loyal fan, and actively seek to write around or think around disappointing elements in the original series, I'd recommend checking out my chapter on Beauty and the Beast in Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Here was a series that many, though not all, fans thought took a wrong turn which violated the genre contract the producers had made with their viewers and many chose to disavow an entire series and proceed with the fandom as though it had never existed as part of the canon.

Now, I want to share two letters I received from other fans who wanted to share their thoughts on the ending of cult series. I would be happy to see more such letters at hjenkins@usc.edu and will publish more if they come. Do let me know if you intend your letter for publication.

Dr. Jenkins,

The ending of series can certainly be a challenge for everyone involved, especially the fans. I remember well when the original Star Trek television series moved to less-favored time slots and eventually went off the air. It is probably fortunate that they did not have the inclination at the time to do a major "wrap up" episode, which left fans and professional writers alike the opportunity to continue the storyline and expand it into many other series set in the universe that Gene Roddenberry built.

I was, by the way, one of those fans who continued the series in dreadful, typed fan-fic stories that circulated in small eddies, a practice that also got me through the long dry-spells between Star Wars movies. I'd never be rival to Timothy Zahn, but my own imaginings and characters satisfied my desire to know what happened in a way that did not detract from what became the official story line. My friends and I enjoyed our now-online "alternate universe" versions, and the challenge of creating believable plots and character development arcs gave me new sympathy for professional writers.

This is not to say that I do not understand the sense of disappointment and loss when a series - or character - is terminated before I am ready. I still consider Firefly the best series that should never have ended. The movie Serenity explained many of gems Josh Wheaton had hidden in store for us, but I will always grieve that we did not see the interplay between those 9 superb characters (and actors!!) beyond the first season. But I also wonder if, in the need to turn out an episode on schedule, the cast and crew would have started moving in directions that disappointed me and the rest of its many fans. As it is, we have our memories, favorite lines, and our mental model of who these characters would have become.

Art, after all, is a cooperative enterprise - while the television presents us with episodes in our favorite characters' lives, the audience also fills in and extrapolates for itself meaning of whom these people "are" to us. For some of us, myself included, they can be more than entertainment. If we follow them for years and invest them with importance to us personally, then they do have deeper meaning. They may be role models or exhibit a part of our personalities that we do not or cannot express in the "real world" of our socio-cultural reality. Watching them gives us an opportunity to play with identity, perhaps in ways not open to us normally. We might not have a strong, professional woman in our "real" lives, but seeing that character on the screen can help us imagine being one ... and then becoming one in a case of a projected identity becoming actual.

In retrospect, considering all the series and characters I have followed, I wonder if cult series should avoid conclusive wrap up episodes. The last episode (heck, the last season) of Lost, for instance, felt like a cheat - not answering the questions that I did have while also not advancing the characters in a way that felt authentic, to me. While, at the time, a series' sudden end (as with the very uneven Odyssey 5) leaves me with questions, it also leaves me freedom to imagine for myself what would have been if only the series had continued. And in many ways, the audience's own imagination - as Hitchcock demonstrated - is more powerful than laying it all out on the screen in vivid, authoritative, bound-to-disappoint-someone conclusion.

Barbara Z. Johnson

From Eugenia:

WHY THE FINALE TO BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (2003) DIDN'T WORK FOR ME

POSSIBLE RESOLUTIONS TO THE SERIES

Sometime during Season 3, I had decided that there were three types of resolutions to this series. These were:

1. Everyone dies.
2. Most of the main characters survive.
3. The postmodern non-ending ending.

1. Everyone dies

According to the laws of narrativium and story logic [1], this was the most likely resolution. Hints, or what other writers call "foreshadowing", in this direction were themes such as humanity wasn't fit to survive and children didn't come into their own until their parents were eliminated. Minor plots centered on schisms in the population leading to violence, characters suffering fatigue both mentally and physically, and characters becoming addicted to mind-altering substances. Logically these actions would have led to depleting resources to the point the fleet would be unable to defend or sustain itself.

2. Most of the main characters survive

Given Moore and Eick's manifesto [2] which described their "re-imagining" as "Naturalistic Science Fiction" and which stated, "Our goal is nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series", something resembling an optimistic ending was the least likely resolution. After several seasons of "gritty realism", bleakness, and despair, the reversion to something resembling a traditional ending where the "good" guys win would be tantamount to an admission of failure of their "re-imagined" series.

Rationalizations of following the original series are mere excuses. Moore and Eick never felt obligated to follow anything in the original series beyond the title, the character names (even then demoted to "call signs" or last names), and the general design of the eponymous spaceship. It's absurd to even bring up Galactica: 1980 to justify the ending; that series wasn't titled Galactica: 148,000 BC.

3. The postmodern non-ending ending

In light of the "critical acclaim" of the series in the first two seasons, this conclusion to the series was possible if Moore and Eick sought to reinstate their favoured position with the critical intelligentsia.

The typical ingredients of postmodern works are evident in the series: style over substance, juxtaposition of different elements, references to past works, combination of the "lowbrow" and "highbrow", ambiguity, nihilism, and self-awareness of the artificial contrivance involved in creating the "work". Frequently accompanying postmodern literature or art is the author's stated intention to make it "difficult" for the reader or viewer. Not only difficult in interpreting it, but also even reading or looking at it due to the revolting subject matter.

These traits were evident in the series with its use of documentary (cinema-verite) camera work, the "re-imaging" of a "cheesy, 1970's TV show" into something "complex" with "layers of meaning", the disjointed narrative which frequently shifted time frames leaving gaps in the storyline, the monotone colour scheme of the costumes and sets making it difficult to distinguish characters, and viewers constantly being referred to deleted scenes and podcasts to fill in the gaps. Adding to the difficulty in understanding the storyline was demanding the viewer to shift frames of reference in quick succession. At times it was space opera, at others it was contemporary drama, and at still other times abstract symbolism. A frequent trait in postmodern literature is the author making an appearance in the story itself, so Moore's cameo in the final scenes was not unexpected.

What is claimed as sophisticated and erudite is merely confusing as the postmodern approach repeatedly disrupts the "suspension of disbelief" which narrative fiction relies on. The conclusions of such works are often self-referential or circular in that they return to the beginning.

WHAT DID WE GET?

Basically the conclusion was a traditional "happy" ending in which most of the main characters survive and a quick addendum of the postmodern self-referential with a few final swipes at the original series.

Moore and Eick just couldn't resist making the "Guardians" (old-school Cylon centurions) all on the "evil" side and obliterated. They just couldn't resist pitching the whole fleet into the sun accompanied by the original 1978 series title music played at the tempo of a dirge [3]. They just couldn't resist one last potshot regarding the original Baltar's beheading/non-beheading [4].

WHY IT DIDN'T WORK FOR ME

It contradicted the underlying assumption of the science fiction genre. Underneath the spaceships, lasers, funny-looking makeup, etc. is the ideal that the scientific method enables progress through a greater understanding of the physical world. As such, it allows humanity to determine its own destiny by surviving threats of extermination from disease, natural disasters, and predators.

The finale succumbed to the romantic notion of the "noble savage" living in harmony with nature by giving up material possessions, advanced technology, and accumulated knowledge. In essence, these Colonials sentenced their direct descendants to ignorance and a minimal existence. This is the antithesis of the science fiction genre's foundation. The series conclusion reveals that the "optimism" that Moore and Eick criticized as unrealistic in Star Trek was actually a lack of understanding on their part of the values inherent in the scientific method and Western civilization.

The cyclical "what has happened before, will happen again" typifies Eastern traditions. Destiny is preordained meaning when it come right down to it, an individual or civilization having no "free will". References to the "Head" people as angels who are acting in accordance with God's instructions is actually in direct opposition to the original series "Beings of Light". The "Beings of Light" represented the possibility of humanity's evolution to a higher state yet they could not "interfere with freedom of choice [5]", unlike the "re-imagined" series "Head" people who directly interfered and acted in the capacity of fate or destiny.

Various comments regarding comparisons of the original series to the "re-imagined" series indicate that some viewers weren't paying attention or were not able to recognize recurring themes without a character pontificating at length. When the original series mentioned that Kobol's [6] civilization migrated and abandoned technology, it stated: "And when they settled the Colonies, they turned on the very technology that could have saved them had they used it properly [7]". This theme is later alluded to in dialogue referring to the Cylons as "a race of beings who allowed themselves to be overcome by their own technology [8]". Technology wasn't considered evil in and of itself, but that it could be misused either intentionally or through over-reliance.

The original series connected the themes of "free will" and the use of technology. These themes are intertwined in the episode "War of the Gods" and complement the surface mythic storyline. In being seduced by technology, there is the danger of losing one's humanity or soul. To retain "free will", and thus humanity, it was deemed necessary to maintain family, community, and knowledge through religious, educational, political, and military structures. To submit blindly to another power is to lose "free will" and the ability to determine one's future. This point was again visited in the episode "Experiment in Terra" with the words: "I came from a world where the people believed the opposite of war was peace. We found out the hard way that the opposite of war is more often slavery. And that strength -- strength alone -- can support freedom [9]".

[1] The force that holds the story together as defined by Terry Pratchett.

[2] Ron Moore, Battlestar Galactica: Naturalistic Science Fiction or Taking the Opera out of Space Opera 2002

[3] Has this series ever used the 1978 Stu Phillips title music theme at the original tempo in all of its orchestral glory? Especially the trumpet fanfare?

[4] That one was for me, wasn't it, Ron?

[5] Being of Light, "Lost Planet of the Gods, Part II"

[6] Incidentally, the Akkadian word for planet or star is kakkabu, which doesn't take much effort to transform into Kolob or Kobol.

[7] Adama, "Lost Planet of the Gods, Part II"

[8] Baltar, "War of the Gods, Part II"

[9] Apollo, "Experiment in Terra"

How Should Cult Series End?: A Reponse

Last time, I posed the question of how to end a series which has attracted a passionate and committed fan following -- using Smallville as our central example. Today, I wanted to give some of the people associated with the series a chance to respond and share some of their perspectives on trying to close out Smallville's tenth and final year as a television series. Specifically, I asked them to reflect on how they closed off the Chloe Sullivan storyline which some fans had come to see as emblematic of what it means to be a professional women in the early 21st century. As I mentioned last time, I am grateful to Mark Warshaw of the Alchemists for his help in arranging for these responses. The first comes from Kelly Souders, an alum of USC's Graduate Screenwriting Program, who joined the Smallville team, with her creative partner Brian Peterson as staff writers and finished their ninth and final season on the show as Executive Producers and showrunners. Kelly's frank and intelligent discussion of the challenges of constructing and managing transmedia characters was a highlight of this year's Transmedia Hollywood 2 conference, as you will see when we release the videos of that event through this blog late next week.

What are some of the challenges you face in trying to bring about closure to something as long-form as a cult television series like Smallville?

Honestly, "challenges" is a polite way to put it. Trying to sum up a decade of stories and characters, trying to sum up that season's arc, trying to give people as much as they can (knowing even a major feature film couldn't do it and they aren't following a nine day shoot and many other tv constraints) is pretty much... impossible. But, the benefit of a ten year show is that the people that are there after so long are there because they are passionate. And everyone gave 150%.

Given the diverse investment fans make in such series, what steps can producers take to live up to their expectations?

You just do everything you can. Everyone does. You try to think of every angle every fan has and try to shine a light in that part of the story. The issue is always that fans don't agree. Some people loved Chlollie and some people loved Black Queen -- bam, right there you've failed half the expectations before you've even picked up a pen. You simply try to finish the story that was started and you don't sleep much.

Some fans have expressed concern that the ending of Smallville effectively has "undone" some of the character development from the rest of the series, for example closing off Chloe's career ambitions. How would you respond to these concerns?

Well, this answer is going to be a bit long because I'm such a big Chloe fan myself. First I have to give a big "HUH?" to the Chloe part. As a woman who has a pretty demanding job and two children at home under the age of four, I have to say I was floored by that one. I'm not sure why anyone thought her reading a book at night meant she wasn't going to her computer down the hall to check in with the JLA.

I guess the thought never crossed any of our minds or we would have thrown in some line like "Say goodnight to Superman in your comics, I have a co-worker to check in with..."

Because Allison was doing a play during filming, we only had her for one week of the two parter, so that's why we had to say goodbye to her character for the most part at the end of the first part. It's also why we were very clear when she was leaving Oliver that she was going off to be a "hero" and to Star City to manage the team. It was important to us that the Chloe career woman kept climbing the career ladder.

The reasons why we book ended with the boy were because we wanted her to be the first person to say "superman" and we wanted the woman we were always rooting for who had some bad luck in her personal life over the years to be victorious in that as well. We wanted her to have it all.

This second response comes from Allison Mack, the actress who played the part of Chloe Sullivan, and has now moved on to do stage work:

I want to begin this response by stating how moved and honored I am to know that a piece of work I was involved in creating over the last decade has inspired such passion, commitment and support. I believe our ability to have deep emotional experiences is what makes life worth living. Knowing that I was and am a small part of inspiring this type of experience is more gratifying than I can express. Thank you.

I will say, I have had the most interesting few weeks. When I was informed of my fans reaction to the series finale I took notice. Throughout my experience on Smallville I have been exposed to incredible amounts of support from several different fan groups. Legendary Woman and AllisonMackonline.com are just two of the many groups doing exceptional things to honor the character I helped to shape, mold, and grow. This has always been a flattering and exciting process for me.

Ten years ago my good friend Mark Warshaw (also the creator of The Chloe Chronicles) asked me what I want to do with my work. I responded by telling him I wanted "To inspire people to do more in their lives". Over the course of the show I have had the privilege to create a character that stands for nobility, integrity, and honor. As woman of strength and passion, Chloe upholds so many traits I strive to uphold in my personal life and when I heard the fans expressed deep betrayal, I did not take the response lightly.

I thought for a long time about what to do and spoke with several mentors about how to best respond to this reaction. It was amazing to me a dream I recited to a friend over breakfast had come to life and was now at risk. Something had to be done.

Your outcries have allowed me to look at my position as an actor from a new perspective and the potential potency for influence with this is both intimidating and thrilling. I see my responsibility as an actress as being very serious and an incredible privilege. This is not to say that I want to be type cast as a "Chloe" but there are certain characters that portray metaphoric representations that I will not take on.

As for the show, I would prefer not to take a stance on the storyline itself. Not because I don't have opinions, I absolutely do, but more because I believe this is not about stating if the ending was "good or bad" and "right or wrong", more it is about learning how to take what was presented and look at it from all angles. What is both good and bad about it? How are the choices the characters made valuable and not?

The point is not the judgment we place on what we watch, but what we do with what we see. Do we use it to explore our own beliefs more deeply? Do we agonize and analyze the potential of choosing one path over another, thereby expanding our own capacity for deliberate choices? Do we allow ourselves to empathize so deeply with the characters we love that we challenge our prejudices and ultimately build our strength for compassionate and humane interactions? This is a process I believe can change the world. It is the reason I love what I do.

What if the result of this ending for Chloe has created an examination of the purpose of media for both the viewers of the show and myself? What if as an effect of this very show we recognize that now is the time for people to start to examine the nature of popular culture and entertainment more deeply? What if a result of this very discussion entertainment itself becomes a tool for education and evolution rather than something used to disappear and regress?

As it currently exists media is more often than not used as an excuse to turn one's brain off, to avoid thinking or growing. In my opinion this is a tragic misuse of one of the most effective tools developed. This would be a dream come true as it is one of my personal passions for media and technology.

In the end, maybe the metaphor for Chloe in the show's finale is bad and maybe it is good, but more than that this situation reveals an opportunity to re examine the way we use this force we call "media". This is not a matter of just ending a story nor is it a matter of just having a resolution for a character. This is an opportunity to create new archetypes and change the face of our interactions with entertainment.

So, I believe, what is important about this whole experience is understanding it. Taking the lessons from our responses and seeking to more thoroughly investigate our perceived adversaries, our archetypes and ourselves. Whether it is "good or bad" remains to be seen. That part is in our hands.

I would love to hear what you are thinking. As I did with the discussion of committed relationships and Castle, I am going to suggest you send your responses to me directly via e-mail at hjenkins@usc.edu so you don't have to face the headache of my spam catcher. I will post as many responses as I can through the blog proper. Please be clear if you are sending this personally to me or want to see it published.

So, if you are a Smallville fan, what did you think about how the series ended and how might you like to see the series extended in new directions, as Mack suggests here?

And if you are not a fan of Smallville, share your thoughts about the endings of other cult series. Which ones were handled the best? Which were handled the worst? What steps can producers take in responding to fan disappointments around the series? What would you like to tell "The Powers That Be" about how cult series should end?

Next time, I will share some closing thoughts and we will hear from Flourish Klink, a former student of mine who is now Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists, and perhaps from some of you.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Series, or How Should Cult Series End?

The May 20th issue of Entertainment Weekly included a list of what they saw as the most controversial television series finales; they included Lost, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Saint Elsewhere, and Newhart. The piece was timely since as I was reading it, I was hearing of some of the controversies surrounding several of the cult television series which concluded this season. Reader Polly Robinson shared with me an interesting set of developments around Stargate:Universe getting canceled. I wrote some time ago about the ways Stargate fans worldwide had lobbied to keep this franchise in production. In this case, the much publicized Universe extension had been canceled by the SyFy Network after only two seasons and dedicated fans wanted an explanation. Craig Engler, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Syfy Digital, went on the GateWorld blog to offer an explanation, offering some interesting behind the scenes insights into how cable networks make decisions about how long and in what ways to prolong struggling series. Not every fan was satisfied by Engler's answers, but most appreciated his efforts to help them understand what had happened.

About the same time, I received an email from Margaret J. Bates, a longtime Smallville fan, who was disappointed with some of the narrative choices made in that series final episodes. Bates had been part of an effort featured on this blog to produce a television commercial paying tribute to the character of Chloe Sullivan, though she wanted me to be clear that the opinions she expressed were her own and not necessarily a reflection of that movement as a whole. I asked her to frame her concerns in a way that I could share them with you via this blog and this is what she had to say:

Chloe Sullivan and Caveat Emptor

By Margaret J.B. Bates

Betrayal.

I've wracked my brains for a week to find a way to express my feelings about the finale that don't seem trite or the feelings of a scorned shipper. I tried a first draft pointing out the host of problems about the finale in general, from the insult of Lex's mind wipe to the terrible Superman Returns plot rip off to only seeing a CGI cape after a decade, but I was asked to focus on Chloe only. I can say that, as one of her biggest fans, I was left crushed and angered by her end.

I want to separate this from what I've done for Legendary Women, Inc. and for the Legendary commercial. This is my personal opinion piece and reflects what I feel and what other online fans I've talked to at length feel. It does not, however, speak for either the women who made the commercial or the women who work at LW, Inc. This is personal, not professional.

I also wanted to separate this from what I've done as a fan, as far as working in campaigns, sending in letters, making donations in Chloe Sullivan's name for charity, creating a commercial, and erecting organization in her honor. While I speak for myself only, I still can't separate all that Chloe Sullivan was and can be from my fandom experience, which did include these ventures. I witnessed it. It wasn't just in myself. Chloe Sullivan inspired women and men, both, to write a myriad of letters to the producers expressing what a role model she was by being devoted to her career and by helping superheroes without even having abilities or fighting prowess. She just had herself and her wits. Chloe Sullivan inspired people to raise thousands over two years for The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation because she, as a character, would support philanthropy. Chloe Sullivan inspired a charity to rise composed of other young, business-minded women

She's a hero and a role model, and I cannot speak for anyone officially but myself, but I also can't ignore what a monumental impetus she's been over the last decade for young women and men everywhere to take action.

That's why the finale crushed me and left me feeling cheated beyond words.

Ten years ago, I was promised in part the story of who Chloe Sullivan was. I was promised that I'd see her grow and see an ending to her, and I didn't see that on my screen on May 13, 2011. Chloe was set up as a reporter and a heroine. In the pilot, she's the only character even noticing and investigating Smallville's weirdness, her home illustrated to be the corners of The Torch office. Five years later, fans everywhere cheered when she achieved what she called her dream of working at The Daily Planet ("Thirst," 5.05). When she was fired two and a half years later, not for incompetence but for protecting Clark's secret from Lex Luthor, fans were outraged and waited for her to return. They wrote letters, made books, made donations, and kept asking online spoiler sources and at Comic Con "When will Chloe go back to journalism?"

In the mean time, Chloe established herself as a hero in her own right, especially in season nine and her limited run in season ten, by re-organizing the disbanded Justice League as well as establishing Watchtower as an entity. In season ten, after faking her death, she was able to best the Suicide Squad and use them to save Clark, Oliver and the rest of the JLA from the clutches of the government. This was a woman who was active in her heroism, used her intelligence to outwit opponents such as the Suicide Squad whom the JLA failed to stop, and fought vibrantly for what was right.

She never backed down.

In the final two episodes of her winter arc this season, she expressed that she hadn't "felt like Chloe 1.0" since her days at The Torch student newspaper. She longed to go back to journalism as much as her fans had always begged and asked for it. In "Fortune" (10.15), although it was rushed and established offscreen while the episode was a wastedHangover rehash, Chloe told Clark she was going to report at The Star City Register under an alias so that she could work as a journalist by day and mentor young superheroes personally by night. She was going to have a double identity inspired by Clark, himself.

I was excited when I learned Chloe would return in the finale, ecstatic even. I figured with the press hints about future flash forwards and the quotes about how the finale would show Chloe evolving that we'd be able to glimpse her working at a newspaper, to see that career woman so many fans had missed and clamored for during the last three years, the person Chloe said that she wanted to be. We were also excited to see how she'd mentor the new generations of heroes. Even if it was just a minute or two flash of her leaving her office at The Register to go to a night training session of an unnamed student, it would have been a coda to who she was independently as a journalist, a mentor, and a heroine.

We didn't see that.

We didn't see anything that reflected what Chloe Sullivan had been established as over the ten years of the series. She was there merely to be the maid of honor, promote the wedding we all knew was destined to happen at some point, and to disappear with little aplomb fifty minutes into the episode. While returning cast members like Rosenbaum, O'Toole and Schneider (who played a ghost no less) all had final one-on-one scenes with Welling, Mack was denied this. Chloe and her fans were denied final closure on the only relationship that had been presented onscreen for all ten years of the show's run. An eleven second hug and a "See you in the funny pages" quip was not sufficient, especially in a finale that dragged in the first hour and repeated plot points like Lionel making a deal with Darkseid.

It was a clear slap in the face.

The producers, for whatever reason and I suppose ratings, held out a steak for us and promised that the finale was about returning characters and that Chloe had something special just for her and a great moment to shine.

They lied.

Chloe was an afterthought.

Her biggest role as narrator was the biggest slap to me. It could have been done more convincingly with any Canadian day player/random extra reading a comic book to their son. It would have made so much more sense. Why would there even be a Smallville comic book in a universe with Superman in it? How does Clark even have a secret identity in a world with Smallville and DC Comics? Why does Lex have to have an erased memory if everyone can learn Clark's secret identity for the price of a comic?

Besides being an essential paradox to have Chloe Sullivan reading Smallville comics to her son in 2018, it's a huge retcon to the character. In ten years, over two hundred episodes, Chloe never once expressed the desire to become a mother, never once. Lois has. Lana has. Tess acted as a surrogate mother with Alexander/Conner Kent. Chloe Sullivan was one of the few female characters on the show never to express an interest in motherhood. She wanted and talked endless about her career--whether that be journalism, heroism, or both---and she was always shown as having severe abandonment issues because of her mother leaving her as a child. Of all the women of Smallville, frankly, Chloe's deep psychological issues make her least fit to even be one.

But that's moot. She never once expressed the desire. The majority of her fans wanted her to be kickass reporter or kickass Watchtower or both. There wasn't a need to see her out there, seven years down the line, a spectator to the world of heroes she'd forged, reading bedtime stories. It doesn't match with the character created over a decade, nor does it match the character from the comics. In DC Comics, Chloe Sullivan was introduced as a well-decorated blogger out to investigate Luthorcorp, not a mother.

I wouldn't complain as vehemently if we'd seen her tuck her son in and then walk down the hall past awards for journalism on the walls or if she'd kissed him goodnight and said "Mommy has an article to finish up tonight." Then I could at least know she was still living her dream of reporting.

We didn't see that.

It would have taken a line drop, a prop, even an extra scene in the middle of a turgid pace to clear up the ambiguous and shoddy end for Chloe Sullivan, but the producers didn't even bother. The writers didn't care. They wanted the wrap around gimmick of reading Clark's story to be done by Chloe, probably not even realizing the paradox it created or the way it took Chloe from hero helping shape Clark's world to a narrator passively retelling it half a world away.

Yes, half a world.

No one bothered to explain why the package she sent Lois came from Signapore, a place Chloe had never been to during the series and a place she'd never expressed an interest in living and one, frankly, that was pointedly as far from Clark, Lois, Superman and The Daily Planet as possible and fairly far off from The Star City Register and Oliver Queen as well. No one bothered to explain why after going through superhuman efforts to "free herself from her old identity, she settled for something lesser...a relationship" (10.14 "Masquerade") by being married to someone under her birth name. Note it is even unclear to whom she is married, Oliver or a nameless future beau. Writer Al Septien and director Greg Beeman have differed publicly on the child's parentage already. The producers didn't explain why, as pointed out in "Legion" (8.11), no one even knows Chloe's name or that she ever existed when she's using it here, when she's alive, and when she basically built Watchtower from the ground up as her baby and saved Clark, Oliver and the League a dozen times over.

No one bothered.

They didn't care to.

That's what hurts most---to see my heroine reduced from this vital intense career woman to a forgettable person half a world away doing daily mommy chores and acting a passive narrator to the great exploits of Clark Kent. She was a non-entity and after ten years of waiting she deserved more .

Her fans deserved more.

It was a contract. We paid hundreds of dollars over the years for merchandise and DVDs, gave them ratings to survive, and invested a decade and hours upon hours in Chloe's story as well as Clark's and Lex's. All we got was "It's a comic book because it's like a comic book." Clark reached destiny because the future said so. Lex was stripped of his mind and any reason for even being evil, stripped to two dimensional villainy. Worst of all, Chloe Sullivan became a forgettable housewife in Asia with an ambiguous and poorly written ending because, I'll just say it, she has the wrong name.

Chloe Sullivan shouldn't exist.

So the writers did worse than kill her; they murdered everything she ever stood for and promised us we'd like it.

We hate it. I hate it.

They had the final say and discretion in how Chloe Sullivan's onscreen life ended on the show Smallville , but, I hope via fanfiction and charity projects and even lobbying DC to see more of Chloe the comics, that the fans can ensure that the character doesn't fade away.

She's a reporter. She's a career woman. She's a mentor and hero.

To us, she'll always stay that way.

The final shots of Chloe onscreen were a betrayal, but they give us a choice too. A choice to reject and re-appropriate, a choice to vote with our wallets. I might not have seen an ending that honored ten years of show continuity, character history or even comics canon, but, then again, I don't have to buy box sets ever again, and I won't.

Buyer beware but, damn, how sweet it is to be paying for it no longer.

Craig Byrne, webmaster of KryptonSite and author of five Smallville licensed companion books, offered this account of fan response to the final episode:

I think the general response to the finale of Smallville is dependent on what the viewer signed up to see. There are people who were elated that their favorite characters ended the series together, and there were people who celebrated the fact that after ten years, Clark Kent has become Superman. There is some negative reaction - some have complained about the computer-generated Superman and lack of full-on Superman from Tom Welling, and others didn't care for having Lex Luthor forget everything - but there is a strong feeling that the show at the very least was able to go into a series finale and conclude itself rather than having the network make the decision for them.

There have been several cult series that have been canceled with no real warning. Veronica Mars, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Heroes, and recently V being prime examples. To be able to go into the last year, as a viewer, and know that I'd end up satisfied, that things wouldn't be left hanging, was really appreciated, as I'm sure it was for the show's producers as well.

There are inevitably people who won't let go. The ones who want a Season 11, or those who want Tom Welling to be the next movie Superman. Having been through this before with Lois & Clark, I know the routine when it comes to Superman projects - it's onward and upward to the next version of the story. I have no doubt Tom Welling, Erica Durance, and others might take part in future Superman projects in other roles - much like Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Teri Hatcher, and even Annette O'Toole did with Smallville. It's a legacy and something they will never lose.

It sounds cheesy but a cult series never ends as long as it exists in your heart. If you wonder what happens to the characters after that final moment, they did their jobs.

Personally I'm excited to discover new things and hopeful another comic book TV series that's as good as Smallville was comes along someday. I'd love to see a "Smallville Season 11" comic as Joss Whedon did so well with Buffy for Dark Horse comics. But if we don't - that's fine. Sometimes I think Clark's destiny as Superman is best left to the imagination.

I think every effort was made to throw in as much as possible for the long-time fans. Getting Michael Rosenbaum back was a must, and although their time with him was limited, he elevated the material. Having John Schneider back as a ghostly Jonathan was also one of the episode's best touches.

Inspired by what GateWorld had done to help fans get some closure on the ending of their series, I reached out to contacts I had with the Smallville production team via Mark Warshaw of The Alchemists, who had developed some of the original transmedia content around the series. Through his help, we've been able to talk with several folks associated with the program, and their responses will run next time. I should be clear that I have only seen a limited number of episodes of Smallville and so am not taking my own position on this, but since I was in a situation to help clarify things between the producers and the fans, I am offering this website as a channel of communication.

I welcome your feedback on the conclusion of Smallville or of other cult series, and will run a special reader's response post, if I hear back from enough people. Send your comments directly to me at hjenkins@usc.edu and signal if they are intended for publication.

Coming Soon: Acafandom and Beyond

In the summer of 2007, this blog hosted a rich series of exchanges concerning "gender and fan studies," which paired male and female researchers together to reflect on the impact that gender had on their work. We are still feeling the impact of these exchanges in terms of new collaborations between researchers and new paradigms for approaching our shared interests. This summer, the blog is going to host another large scale conversation, this time focused on the concept of the Acafan and the kinds of work this term has done for helping us to sort through our complex emotional and intellectual relationships to our object of study and the equally complicated relationship between our professional lives as fans and who we are in our personal lives. We wanted to expand the concept to bring together people from Game Studies, Critical Race Theory, Performance Studies, Queer Studies, and Gender Studies, who are confronting similar issues surrounding the role of subjectivity and cultural criticism. This time, we are working with groups of three, a number purposefully chosen to avoid binaries and force us to collectively find common ground across a range of perspectives. Each week, we will have three short 500-1000 word provocations coupled with the transcript of an exchange between the three contributors. Public discussion sparked by these provocations will continue at a yet to be designated spot on Live Journal and periodically I will be sharing highlights from this larger public discussion through this blog. We want as many fans, academics, and acafen to weigh in on these topics as possible and will do our part to give you stuff to chew on all summer long.

The discussion has been organized and will be moderated by Kristina Busse, Drew Davidson, Henry Jenkins, Louisa Stein, and Karen Tongson.

This series builds upon a series of exchanges in the Fan Studies world over the past year around the concept of the "Acafan," including a rich discussion last summer through Jason Mittell's and Ian Bogost's blogs, a special issue of FlowTV, and a Society for Cinema and Media Studies panel organized by Louisa Stein. Contributors for the series are also drawn from participants in Drew Davidson's Well Played books, which offer subjective criticism of computer and video games, and are intended to showcase the launch of the new Postmillenial Pop book series which Karen Tongson and I are co-editing for New York University Press.

Overview

At the heart of the acafan debates has been the question of what aspects of our lived experiences we bring to our work as scholars and critics. All of us, of course, write from many different identities based on race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, generation, ideology, discipline, and cultural preference. The acafan identity, as it has emerged through fan studies, offers a response to accounts of media consumption that in their supposed objectivity were too distanced, too critical, and ultimately pathologizing. The term describes specific relations to our objects of study and draws upon situated knowledge to help explain the contradictions of contemporary popular culture. Acafan scholarship has worked to model a scholarly position that is proximate and impassioned and engaged, but which also is substantive and demanding (in all of the best ways that fan writing can be).

In this discussion we want to expand the questions and the focus to address autobiographical research and the role of the researcher in general. In so doing, we want to look at the ways different fields and disciplines have faced the problem of being invested in and accountable to different aspects of our identity, such as academic and fan. We are interested in the way this can and has affected our research and the way it has affected our intersectional identity. We are also interested in discussing the relationship between forms of academic knowledge creation and presentation and the relation between lived experience and academic work.

As we search for interdisciplinary commonalities, we also want to explore the limitations to the notions and practices of acafandom. Beyond objectivist proponents, who fault acafans for being too close and too engaged, some scholars resist the approach for the way it possibly affords fans special status and forces too much attention on one particular mode of interaction, ignoring other equally important modes of inquiry. Acknowledging and exploring these objections without abandoning the concept of a participatory and vested research with autobiographical self-awareness is central to this conversation.

Provocations

• [Intersectional identity] How do these identities--as lived, performed, constructed, and embodied--shape what we see, what we study,what we say and who we address through our professional work? What are some of the ways we mobilize these identities within our work and when do they get in the way of the critical distance expected of serious scholarship?
• [Origins and influences] What does the acafan concept owe to larger debates about the nature of "subjective criticism" in feminism, critical race theory, and queer studies? What has been the contribution of fan studies to these other related fields, or what might fan studies contribute in the future?
• [Related developments] How might the debates about the acafan concept relate to other debates in connected fields of popular culture studies, such as discussions about the emergence of the "new games journalism" as a means of capturing the subjective experience of players?
• [Affective investment] These debates historically had to do with the unstable relations between pleasure/affect/the body/desire and politics/identity/power. Do stable or essential terms have the flexibility to respond to this shifting terrain? Have we found a way to talk about pleasure which no longer requires self-reflexivity about our politics?
• [Acafan as a concept] How have the evolving traditions of acafandom shaped the landscape of which fan practices are studied and which are left invisible? In our increasingly digitized academic public sphere, how do performances of simultaneous academic and fan identities raise both pragmatic and ideological concerns?
• [The limits of acafandom] Acafandom--be it understood as a cultural and scholarly position or as an interdisciplinary community--has increasingly come under fire from a variety of directions. After more than a decade of use, what do you see as the strengths and limits of the term acafan as a way of characterizing the shared subjectivity between fans and academics? What has the term allowed us to communicate? What mixed messages might it carry? What has it limited our ability to see and to say?
• [Acafandom as institutional practice] The term acafan emerged from a particular configuration of the relations between fandom and academia, yet the emergence of a new and rather substantial generation of acafans has resulted in some changes in the practices and norms of the academic world. How have the relations between fans and academics shifted over the past decade and how do these changes impact the concepts which acafan was intended to express?

Participants:

• Christine Bacareza Balance
• Sarah Banet-Wiser
• Nancy Baym
• Gerry Bloustein
• Will Brooker
• Jayna Brown
• Rhiannon Bury
• Jay Bushman
• Kristina Busse
• John Campbell
• Heather Chaplin
• Melissa Click
• Francesca Coppa
• Drew Davidson
• Alex Doty
• Jennifer Doyle
• Corvus Elrod
• Sam Ford
• Nick Fortugno
• Jonathan Gray
• Judith Halberstam
• Karen Hellekson
• C. Lee Harrington
• Matt Hills
• Henry Jenkins
• Alex Juhasz
• Flourish Kink
• Derek Kompare
• Anne Kustritz
• Frank Lantz
• Alexis Lothian
• Alan McKee
• Jason Mittell
• Roberta Pearson
• Alisa Perren
• Erica Rand
• Cornel Sandvoss
• Suzanne Scott
• Parmesh Shahani
• Sangita Shreshtova
• Louisa Stein
• Karen Tongson
• Catherine Tosenberger
• Matt Yockey

Learning from Hollywood: Voices from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Conference

I spent the first part of the week participating in a conference, hosted by the USC Cinema School and organized by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Learning from Hollywood: Can Entertainment Media Ignite an Education Revolution?" This was the kind of event that warms my radically undisciplined heart and mind -- a gathering of people from many different backgrounds (educators and academics, media industry people from both the commercial and public media worlds, activists and nonprofits, foundations, librarians and curators) to talk about the potential intersection between education and entertainment. In the course of the two days, we heard a lot about the value of stories and storytelling to incite the imagination, to provoke curiosity, to convey our collective memories and wisdom, and to inspire more acts of creativity.

This was perhaps best brought alive for me through a performance by The Story Pirates -- a group of actors, improv comedians, and otherwise kooky and creative people, who go into schools around the country, help young people construct their own stories, and then incorporate them into their performances. In this case, they brought a class of Latino/a elementary schools with them, both performing one young man's previously written stories, and soliciting elements from the kids for a story performed live on the spot.

My own remarks at the conference centered on what the practices and logics of participatory culture might bring to the paradigm of "entertainment education" which I have been learning a lot about since coming to USC. Under the classic version of this model, experts consult with script writers to get information about health or social concerns integrated into the fictional programs and sometimes to get tags or bumpers which help link viewers to the groups working on these issues. I really respect the commitment behind such work and know that it does make a difference for many people. But increasingly, I've wondered what would happen if these same projects got taken up by the fan communities around the show, if the messages were not simply embedded in the program but designed to be acted upon in more creative and public ways. I used the example of what's happened around Harry Potter to describe a movement from inspiring reading to inspiring writing to inspiring activism, remarks which build upon the work my Civicpaths research group has been doing for the MacArthur and Spencer Foundations.

Scott Traylor from 360KID, who I knew from back at MIT, was nice enough to capture my remarks and those of several other speakers via his cellphone camera and has given me permission to share some of these segments with you through this blog. Thanks, Scott. So, this first bit is my talk on Harry Potter and the potential of a more participatory model of entertainment education.

Scott also captured some of the highlights from a panel on Monday night on "Storytelling and the Art of Engagement," hosted by Betty Cohen, the former President of the Cartoon Network and the Lifetime Network, and including film producers Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) and Doug Wick (Gladiator, Memoirs of a Gesha) and television producer Marcy Carsey (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, Third Rock from the Sun), sharing their insights on Hollywood's craft and speaking about their desire to see the work that they do more fully incorporated into both formal and informal education. Getting these kinds of glimpses into the behind the scenes production processes is one of the great joys of living so close to Hollywood.

Here are two highlights Scott captured -- showing Carsey talking about the need to "respect the audience"...

And Wick talking about how he draws inspiration from the work of Bruno Bettelheim:

The event was also a place for demonstrations by some top digital designers and developers, including this segment on Sifteos by a Media Lab alum Jeevan Kalanithi.

On Tuesday morning, we heard from Linda Burch from Common Sense Media and Frank Gilliam, Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs, talking about the challenges of overcoming existing frames parents and teachers have for thinking about the relations between digital media and schooling. Scott captured Gilliam's remarks, which offer some real insights into how and why some of the messaging around digital media and learning may be falling on deaf ears.

Unfortunately, Scott had to fly back to Boston so we do not have some of the other highpoints of the conference, such as a presentation by Participant Media's John Schreiber on their Waiting for Superman documentary;

an interview with Kari Byron, the charming host of Mythbusters, about their new Headrush initiative, to help inspire girls to think about STEM; and closing remarks by media mogul Peter Gruber.

All told, my head is exploding from new insights and beyond that, new connections, many of which I hope to build upon through this blog in the weeks ahead.

Special thanks to Cooney Center Director Michael Levine who has helped pull together this phenomenal event.

From the VCR to YouTube: An Interview with Lucas Hilderbrand (Part One)

What happened before YouTube? It's a question we've addressed here many times before. Many different histories lead to our current moment of video sharing and DIY media-making -- some subcultural (the history of fandom and a range of other communities of practice which are generating new content), some economic, some technological. Lucas Hilderbrand, author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, holds some critical pieces of the puzzle, writing with historiographical sophistication about the emergence of video as a technology and as set of cultural practices, about the debates it sparked especially around shifts in control over production and distribution, about the communities which formed around the sharing of tapes, and about how all of this looks forward to contemporary digital practices. It is a book which raises vital questions and provides a rich historical context for our current debates.

As someone who lived through the era when the VCR was launched, the book brought back many memories of things I had almost forgotten about the dramatic adjustments which the culture made to this transformative and transgressive technology. Working through the book for an interview, I was struck by the fact that I, like many other instructors, have had very little to say about videotape in my current course on new media and culture, something I will work on the next time I teach it.

Given my enthusiasm for this book, I was delighted to be able to interview Hilderbrand and share with you his own reflections on the ways the history of video can help us to understand some contemporary media developments.

As you note, the debates about videotape form an important precursor to current debates about digital technologies -- especially those concerning the implications of expanding grassroots control over media production and circulation and debates around copying and intellectual property. From the start, video was understood as "out of control," as shifting the balance of power between established media producers and distributors, new entrepreneurs, and consumers. What can we learn from tracing the history of video, which might better inform current discussions around file-sharing, piracy, and YouTube?

For me, the stakes of the project were always largely historical and in response to a threat of cultural amnesia. On the one hand, I was interested in intervening in new media studies, which has historically focused on the newness and nowness of technologies. I was intrigued by work that rethought newness in a historical sense, by returning to the 19th century and examining old media in their own moments of newness. But even this more historical work seemed to erase recent and increasingly obsolete technologies from memory and from the histories of new media. It seemed to me that many of the functions and political struggles surrounding new digital technologies had already pre-existed with tape technologies. I thought that it was important not only to complicate the hype surround new media but also to look back at the lessons we could learn from these prior moments that shaped the present.

In terms of questions of policy and sharing, I was struck that so much of the anxiety about piracy and the litigation around copyright seemed like a replay of the controversies that surrounded audiocassettes and videotape when they were introduced. Both the recorded music and the film industries fought tape because they feared that if audiences could make their own copies, that there would be economic collapse for the content industry. For the film studios, at least, VHS proved to be a huge economic boom. The challenge then, as more recently, was to find a new business model that didn't alienate the audience but also provided reasonable and accessible ways to market content.

But the differences between digital distribution and analog tape sharing are also obviously significant in terms of efficiency and scale and in terms of their financial threat, so we need a technologically specific understanding of both the material practices and policy implications. But there's also a major difference between the ways file sharing and burning a DVD work, so even "the digital" needs to be complicated and differentiated.

You describe video as the beginning of "on demand" culture, but also note that this culture has always been constrained on a practical level by issues of availability. How might we carry forward these tensions between the promises and reality of access to think about recent offerings by Amazon, Netflix, and others, that would make more movies and television shows available on demand?

The innovations are largely changes in convenience: as you have suggested in Convergence Culture, convergence often means the availability of the same content across multiple platforms. Even before streaming video, Netflix was functionally the best video store in the world, insofar as it has more selection than any single brick-and-mortar store could, yet even Netflix's inventory was limited to content that had been released on DVD. There remain treasures and obscurities that have never been made available on DVD. And, of course, every tangible technology wears out eventually, so if Netflix's discs of a film got scratched, broken, or lost and that title had gone out of print, it could not be rented. So there is always the limitation of what is made materially available.

For me, streaming video creates a different set of issues. On the one hand, people seem very enthusiastic about Netflix streaming and Hulu. These offer instant streaming access to an ever-increasing range of films and TV shows, and these have been two of the leaders in establishing a new business model that makes online distribution economically viable for the industry. But that model is based upon licensing and subscription rather than purchase. In other words, what is sold is time and access, but that access could be cut off at any time--if the user stops paying or the service's licensing agreement with the rights-owners lapses. Unless users figure out a way to hack, download, and store the material, we are moving toward a model where there is no longer fixity and the assurance of long-term access that a videotape or a DVD allows. We are also moving away from a collector model. This is potentially alarming for fans and especially for teachers and scholars. It will be very hard to teach film and TV when we no longer have stable access or recordings that can be cued. But in the meantime, most people seem to be embracing the streaming model for its convenience. It's been an economic boom for Netflix, and I frequently hear people complain if they have to wait for a DVD to be mailed rather than have streaming access.

Your book argues that issues of access and copying give rise to an aesthetic that recognizes if not respects the reality of "degeneration" which characterizes all analog video. Yet the digital introduces the potential for a "pristine" copy, an image that does not wear down through use. In my own research, I've watched aesthetic shifts in the fan vidding world between early vids which showed rainbow lines and other technical imperfections which emerged from the process of copying and more recent work that uses digital editing techniques and uses DVDs for the source material. What changes do you think have occurred in "video" aesthetics as a consequence of the shift from analog to digital?

First, I'd like to challenge the concept that digital technologies are perfect. Although in principle reproduction should not involve degeneration, most digital reproduction does involve compression, which is a different kind of loss. Perhaps I didn't think this through as clearly as I could have at the time when I was writing: analog reproduction operates through degeneration, digital reproduction through compression. In addition, so many of our interactions with new technologies involve frustration and troubleshooting, whether it's an unreadable DVD or a problem toggling a laptop to a projector or an email missing an attachment. Some of these problems are about mechanical failure, others about human error.

In terms of resolution, I was struck that, when the electronics and content industries began the push for audiences to adopt HD TVs and DVD formats, we saw more rapid adoption of low-resolution video technologies, from YouTube to cameraphones. These low-res options have become increasingly refined to allow for clearer resolution, but it seemed to me that it was convenience rather than pristine quality that generated a massive response. That said, there are numerous instances on YouTube and elsewhere that viewers will prefer a high-quality copy when it's equally available. But we also see a blurring of the two models of "prosumer": producer-consumers often have access to professional-consumer grade technologies that allow for slick fan productions.

Yet evolutions in video aesthetics, I think, make outmoded image resolutions not just dated but increasingly visible. When I started thinking through analog video aesthetics, there wasn't much analytical work to build from, but there are now many popular examples that suggest recognition of what old video technologies look like. The technology has become a style. A friend told me that his iPhone has a filter on its camera to make the image look like VHS. I've seen similar effects that make still images look like Polaroids. So now we have a fetishization of the retro.

Lucas Hilderbrand is faculty in film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to core courses on film and TV, he teaches classes on popular sound media, documentary, sex in cinema, Disney, and queer nightlife. He is a contributor to flowtv.org

and is currently researching the cultural history of gay bars in the U.S.

Responses to My Rant about House, Castle, and White Collar

My blog post last week ranting about how television deals with committed relationship clearly hit a responsive chord with lots of readers and has generated more response than anything I've posted here in a long, long time. Not only have we had active comments posted on the blog, I've also been receiving messages via e-mail, Tweets, Facebook updates, and in person comments. Today, I wanted to share some of the e-mail responses I've received so far, hoping to generate even more reflection out there on these issues. Please, if you want to add anything and have trouble with the Spam Filter on the blog proper, send me e-mails at hjenkins@usc.edu, and do signal that you intend the comments for publication here. So far, the series most often cited as having a great husband-wife relationship is Friday Night Lights, which I have not seen, but may give a chance based on this level of intense fan excitement.

Mr, Jenkins,

Hello! My name is Nicole Bessette, and I will be attending USC's School of Cinematic Arts as a Critical Studies major in the Fall. While on Twitter today, a friend sent me the link to your most recent article regarding the difficulty television has in representing committed relationships, and much as you confessed to inhaling Castle recently, I seemed to have done the same with your article. Your point of view and the way you so eloquently expressed it really struck a chord in me, so I wanted to take this time to wholeheartedly thank you for sharing it with me and so many others.

I, myself, have been a Castle enthusiast since the show first premiered two years ago, and I always tell people that the best thing about it and the reason why I personally believe it to be the best show on television is because of the writing. Mr. Andrew Marlowe, also a USC alumnus, has truly mastered every ounce of the show--from its characters to its relationships--and what I admire about him most is that he has given us a show that actually feels real. Unlike House, you can fully invest in these characters and the relationships that they have with each other, and at the end of each new episode, you turn off your television feeling as though you're a part of something bigger. For this and many other reasons, I could not agree with you more in believing that Castle is just the show to break the mold of the "unrealistic" TV relationships.

In fact, I have become so taken with Castle that I have begun writing about it for a website called BuddyTV.com. As their exclusive Castle Fan Columnist, I volunteer my time every Monday to write recaps of the latest episodes, and although it is often a very time-consuming process, I couldn't enjoy it more because I am being given such a great opportunity to promote a show that I love. In fact, through the power of the social media phenomenon that is Twitter, I was even fortunate enough to have three of the stars of the show (Molly Quinn, Tamala Jones, and Jon Huertas) read one of my articles. I guess all in all, however, what I am really trying to say, Mr. Jenkins, is that I am so very grateful to you for taking the time to highlight some of Castle's best features and in turn support what I believe to be the best show ever on television. What's more, I very much look forward to meeting you on campus sometime in the near future. Again, my sincerest thanks for taking the time to read this, and I wish you all the best!

--

Nicole Bessette

Hi

The whole conversation about what constitutes a good relationship or a bad one and how some show runners are awesome at portraying every kind of relationship, while others are only good at some, is something I love discussing, so here goes:-

For me a show that always did well with relationships was Friday Night Lights. The central couple of Tami and Eric Taylor were possibly the most realistic portrayal of a married couple I've seen on tv. They had been married for years and knew each other inside out. They did that silent communication thing (FNL were actually really good at letting silences work for them in general), they supported each other when their daughter, Julie, tired to play one against the other. They had silly arguments, they had more serious arguments but never was their love for each other in questions.

The writers didn't feel the need to have anything sensational happen within their marriage - no OMG secrets, no affairs, nothing like that. And they were one of the most compelling couples on TV because they were written WELL. Kind of like all the reasons you cited for liking Elizabeth and Peter on White Collar, who I also love.

I think that's the thing the writers and Nathan Fillion need to remember - if it's well written it will engage the viewer and they'll still want to see what happens next. The problem is it's the badly written relationships that stick in people's minds, creating the idea that as soon as two people finally get it together they become boring. It's the writing and the fact that writers don't necessarily know what they are going to do after the initial get together that creates a problem. For example: Sarah and Chuck's relationship evolved and moved on once they got together, but it's never been boring.

In fact, talking about Chuck, it reminds me of something that really annoys me - when shows will do anything ANYTHING to keep their main couple apart - to the point where it becomes a joke, it no longer comes about organically from the story, but it's just the writers wondering what they can do now to keep them apart and it becomes boring and annoying.

A show that did really badly with relationships was Stargate Altantis. The one that really sticks in my head is the Rodney McKay/Katie Brown fiasco. The two characters went from awkwardly liking each other to McKay proposing. It was ridiculous. McKay never spent any time with Katie and they seemed to find looking at each other, casually touching each other or giving each other chaste kisses really embarrassing. It was baffling that the writers thought that the viewers would buy into the idea that Katie and Rodney were in an actual, grown-up relationship. Then there was McKay's relationship with Keller that seemed to come out of nowhere - at least on McKay's part, and again had him spending little to no time (that the viewer saw or heard about) with the woman he professed to love. Those are not writers who should ever try to depict honest to god grown-up relationships.

I would love to tell certain show runners that you can't just throw a relationship at the viewers and expect them to like it. It needs lead-up, we need to see it happening (or at least be able to look back and see it happening). Also, make sure you don't take time away from the aspects of the show that viewers like, just to be able to include the romance, we kind of hate that. Along the same vain, don't forsake friendships and other relationships that have been portrayed for seasons for a romance that the viewers are going to be less invested in. If you bring in a new character, we resent them, if it's a regular character we resent that the others are being screwed. And if you bring two regular characters together - and it wasn't signposted from the beginning - you are going to have to put up with the fans who hate character A and character B being together.

I'd also like to tell show runners of certain kinds of shows that, really, romance isn't for them. Something like NCIS, for example. I watch that for the team interactions. I don't care about their romantic entanglements. The only one I'm okay with is Abby/McGee because that was something that existed from the moment McGee appeared and somehow the writers have managed to make sure that it doesn't take over the show and it's always done subtly and rather cutely. Compare that to Ziva and Tony, where you often feel like you're being hit over the head with a sledgehammer - also, thinking about Ziva and Tony, if you're actors don't have chemistry when possibly moving towards a romantic relationship, drop it. It's painful to watch.

When romance comes into shows that I don't equate with romance, I tend to stop watching them. I stopped watching CS:NY after the 3rd season because the writers focused WAY too much on Danny and Lyndsay and I found it boring.

And one final thing: show runners, you don't need romantic relationships in shows just to attract women. We like shows with little to no romance just fine and you tend to piss us off if you suggest that a show suddenly has romance in it to 'appeal to women'. Stop. Just, stop it. One of the reasons I like Nikita: the women don't spend their time angsting over guys or talking about them all the time.

I hadn't realised that this had got so long, so I think I'm going to stop now *g*

Iona Liddell

Hi Henry-

I recently rewatched My So-Called Life (thx netflix) and was surprised at how Angela Chase's parents were represented strongly as individuals also trying to navigate their own so-called lives. They were thoughtfully represented as individuals committed to each other while also trying to maintain some sort of healthy and separate identity/autonomy within a marriage and family.

-- C Coy

I think my gold standard for how to show a relationship is always gonna be John Crichton and Aeryn Sun, because even if it didn't reach solidly committed stage until pretty late, somehow it felt like that was what it really was the whole time, in a way. And I never felt any sense that they were any less interesting when they were committed, instead they were more.

But yeah, I agree totally with what you said about White Collar, because I adore the relationships and maturity in that show. \o/

--Alyndra N

Hello Professor Jenkins!

Wannabe aca-fan, graduating student in Media Communication and administrator of Bones Italian fandom, here!

I have to say that I'm always very interested in what you write, both academically and personally, but with the article you wrote yesterday you really touched my inner shipper's heart.

Given my experience on the subject, I think I can add another point of view to the discussion.

I think you're absolutely right when you say that television authors usually don't know how to represent a good healthy committed relationship, but it's also true that -often- they don't even have to arrive to depict that "committed" part of the relationships.

If you ask me, the real problem is that the "will they/won't they" dynamic works too well! I speak from personal experience when I say that it's like an addiction! No matter how long the authors keep the pair a non-couple or how bad the story gets, people can't help but coming back for more, hoping every time that THAT is gonna be THE time...

Unfortunately, this postponing the unavoidable is a pull so strong for the public (especially the female one) that let the networks to collect very high ratings, thus to pose two possible scenarios:

1) the authors get scared, become "cowards" and, dreading the "Moonlighting curse", let the pair remain a non-couple;

2) the authors are ready for the big step, but the network make them wait. And wait. And wait. And the pair remains a non-couple.

In any case, the pair finally becomes a couple when it's usually too late and the story is already ruined.

My favorite series, Bones, for example, is now, in its sixth season, dangerously bordering this "deadline".

Bones is a declared character-driven drama disguised as a procedural, starring Emily Deschanel and dear old pal David Boreanaz from the Whedonverse. It's considered like Castle's big brother because it's the one from where Castle authors take their inspiration. If you are enjoying the characters' dynamics in Castle, you definitely can't miss Bones!

I am now able to appreciate Castle as well (I'm loving the 3rd season!) but I couldn't begin to truly appreciate it until I accepted the fact that it wasn't really a "bad copy" of Bones (here at BuddyTV you can find a very funny article on the subject), but a different show that tries to address most of Bones' main themes from a different perspective.

These two shows definitely have a different "touch", maybe Bones is a little bit more deeper and Castle a little bit more frivolous, but in the end they're very similar and if you like one, you can't help but ending up loving the other as well.

For 5 years in Bones everything was great: the scripts were funny and intense at the same time, the characters explored at 360° and the chemistry between the main (non)couple exceptional, but then the authors (and the network), fearing of ruining everything, didn't have the stomach to take them to the next level when the time was right and decided to drag the story keeping them apart for a little longer but in this way they completely damaged their chemistry, depriving the show from its main point of strength.

Now, Castle has one huge advantage on Bones: it's 3 years younger and can learn from its big brother what to do and what not. Will it have the courage to take the big step sooner than Bones? At the moment, nobody can tell.

I, in the meantime, will keep to watch them both because they are, without any shadow of doubt, the two shows that best narrate their characters and if the writers will be so good to mantain the chemistry between the main couples even when they'll officially become couples, the shows will become even better!

Glad to have read your rant and hoping to read another as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Beatrice Belli

PS: My friends say that Chuck is a tv show where the authors knew how to put together the couple without ruining the chemistry but I don't watch it so I can't confirm, sorry.

Just read your fantastic Castle post. You say it's less aca, more fan - but with fan writing that has insight like that, who even needs academics? :p

You end the post with " But, tell me, what would you most like to teach the show runner of your choice about the care and feeding of actual human characters involved in committed relationships?" But do you specifically mean romantic relationships specifically, or any bond between characters? Because as you rightly point out, while the elements of the plot, the contrivances of the genre, may hook us in and keep us curious, it is always the characters and their emotional attachments to each other that led the viewer forge a connection. Even with something Lost, one of the most successful recent shows to have people coming back for "OMG what's next!", it's eduring appeal, I'd argue, was based on character attachment. Conversely, did Heroes become dull because of contrived plots? Or because we know longer much cared for its characters. Of course, none of what I am writing is I think even remotely novel.

I'll echo everyone on Friday Night Lights. The relationship between First Lady and President was quite interesting on The West Wing. I don't think I've ever paused to reflect on The Good Wife, in part because though I enjoy the show immensely, it rarely bears close scrutiny.

And a really fantastic show in all ways, including a wickedly incisive on again off again romance, is the Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows. It's a metatextual dramedy about a Shakespeare Festival in small town Ontario, where the slightly mad artistic director is haunted by the ghost of the previous artistic director, as they direct Hamlet in the first season, MacBeth in the second, and King Lear in the third. After The Wire, almost certainly the best work of Television I've ever encountered.

Two surprisingly interesting relationship dynamics are in very male dominated show. The first is Californication. You'd think the premise of bad boy artist fuck-up who sleeps around would wear thing after four seasons, and yet amazing, it is still compelling. And his absolutely love for Karen is really something. The relationship is completely FUBAR, and yet it's amazing how much they care about each other, and how we care for them. It's as if Hank Moody exerts on us as viewers the same sort of charm he does on women - we know he's an asshole, part of us just wants to get inside him (metaphorically, in the viewers case).

Second, a surprisingly interesting relationship is Ari Gold and his wife on Entourage. Now, it's not particularly realistic - nothing on the show is - and maybe ways, it's less about them as a couple but how it shows a different perspective to Ari. Even so, it's evolved into something very different than much of the show (and indeed, Ari's marriage is a crucial issue at the end of the most recent season).

And in terms of Castle specifically - yes, I think we'll get there. As it's much more than romantic tension, there have been so many missed connections of confessions of love. I agree with the poster's analysis of bones, that they "will they/won't they" will tire eventually. I think they are playing it out nicely, though occasionally it's torture as a fan. Think of the scene where they finally kiss - and yet, "nothing" evolves from that. Of course, any romantic entanglement between the two will have its own comedic pitfalls. I find it highly unlikely they would stay together without breaking up at least once. But so far, much like Californication, they have managed to stretch a charming premise way past it's usual expiry date, so I give them faith. I think for it to be most engaging, the doctor boyfriend needs to be an actual on screen character as much as he is tallked about. Even with limited screen time, Castle's flames have left way more of a mark than Becket's long term boyfriend.

And as well edited as that "closure" video was....Blah! If I want some that sappy, I'll watch Fillion's old soaps.

Michael Carens-Nedelsky

Dear Henry,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful insights into the problem of TV writing today and the lack of committed relationships being depicted. I have to totally agree with you. I am a HUGE Castle fan and have been watching since the very first episode. I have watched the relationship grow over the past three seasons and it does worry me a bit that one of the actors (Nathan Fillion) is leery about the relationship moving forward and the thought that it will get dull or boring and lose fans by doing so. But, I believe it doesn't have to be that way.

Take, for example, the Thin Man movies you were talking about, and that makes me think of the TV show Hart to Hart. Was that show ever great or what? They were married, the show was interesting, their chemistry was remarkably charming, and I know I was never bored watching it. That was one sexy couple and they were in a committed relationship, imagine that? Also, White Collar also has a great married couple, but Elizabeth is a little bit under used in that series and so we don't see her a whole lot. But, again, it's a great example of what a great committed couple looks like.

As far as House goes, I believe that it all boils down to the characterization. I believe that as he is written, he is just a miserable person and doesn't believe he deserves happiness or even that he can truly be happy. So, I think he will always try to sabotage anything good that could possibly ever happen to him. I know he loves Cuddy and she loves him, but that is one relationship that I think may be better off as it is currently. Especially since he has proven that he can't be there for her when she really needs him (her recent cancer scare) and he's so afraid of his feelings that he turns to drugs again to drown them out. I don't think he will ever be emotionally mature to handle being with her (or anyone really.)

Which brings me back to Castle. I had heard that the creator Andrew Marlowe stated that when creating Castle he modeled part of it from old black and white movies. You can certainly see there are characteristics he used, like the great banter from the Tracy/Hepburn movies like Woman of the Year, or even Hepburn/Grant in Bringing Up Baby (not that he used those specifically I am just referencing movies I feel have that great back and forth between the characters). Castle and Beckett have had that great give and take right from the start. The issue I see is that from the very first episode as the show is written, there is that "attraction." Castle is pretty much hitting on Beckett from the start. I feel that Castle in the first season is depicted a bit as a womanizer. (that is just my opinion and how I saw him in Season One.) I think he has mellowed out as the seasons have gone on and has even shown a bit more maturity as the series progresses. I have sensed that Beckett's hesitation in allowing herself to admit to feelings for him may stem from her first impressions of him (if it was the same as mine. Again I am just speculating).

I feel that if a show starts out from the first episode, catering to this immense attraction, it's only inevitable that the fans start getting restless for the couple to become a romantic couple. Castle is now in Season 3 and we have had episodes like Knockdown where the characters kissed, even though it was supposedly as a "cover". And episodes like Countdown when the characters come very close to death and one character comes close to finally admitting that they love the other (at least it looks like what she was about to say.) Then we have the last few episodes where there is barely any interaction between Castle and Beckett of any kind of personal nature. It's very hard for fans who are rooting for this relationship to all of a sudden feel like the brakes are being slammed on just when that train just started to pick up some speed.

I believe for a show to survive the will they or won't they debate, they should take a clue from The XFiles. This was a show that did not introduce their two main characters right from the start as having this immense sexual tension between them. They developed a working relationship, a friendship and years down the road you get a hint of something deeper going on. I didn't even consider them a romantic couple until the first XFiles movie came out and they almost kissed. That was when it finally dawned on me that they could have the potential to be a great couple. I know a lot of XFiles fans would disagree, just like there are Castle fans out there who don't want to see them get together either. I believe that for Castle, it has to happen. They have to have these characters give a relationship a shot. The writing the whole time has been working towards that, I think it's very obvious. And I do believe they can make it work. Take Scarecrow and Mrs. King for example, they gave it a shot and even got married . Okay, so the marriage was a secret but I believe if Kate Jackson had not gotten sick and if the show hadn't ended due to her illness it would have lasted longer and it would have been exciting to see where it would have gone.

So, yes there is hope that a happy, committed relationship between Castle and Beckett is possible. And I hope the writers prove Nathan Fillion wrong and Stana Katic right. And make some of us die hard Castle fans who want to see them together very happy. And I can't believe I am about to say this but here goes... But, if they feel they do think a romantic relationship between Castle and Beckett will dive bomb like Moonlighting, then let the characters move on and form committed relationships with other people. It would break my Castle fan heart, but at the same time I would rather they just stop it now then hesitate for too long and miss the wonderful chance that could have been theirs.

Thanks so much for listening and so glad you love Castle as much as I do!

Sincerely,

Judy Peak

I, myself, have been a Castle enthusiast since the show first premiered two years ago, and I always tell people that the best thing about it and the reason why I personally believe it to be the best show on television is because of the writing. Mr. Andrew Marlowe, also a USC alumnus, has truly mastered every ounce of the show--from its characters to its relationships--and what I admire about him most is that he has given us a show that actually feels real. Unlike House, you can fully invest in these characters and the relationships that they have with each other, and at the end of each new episode, you turn off your television feeling as though you're a part of something bigger. For this and many other reasons, I could not agree with you more in believing that Castle is just the show to break the mold of the "unrealistic" TV relationships.

In fact, I have become so taken with Castle that I have begun writing about it for a website called BuddyTV.com. As their exclusive Castle Fan Columnist, I volunteer my time every Monday to write recaps of the latest episodes, and although it is often a very time-consuming process, I couldn't enjoy it more because I am being given such a great opportunity to promote a show that I love. In fact, through the power of the social media phenomenon that is Twitter, I was even fortunate enough to have three of the stars of the show (Molly Quinn, Tamala Jones, and Jon Huertas) read one of my articles. I guess all in all, however, what I am really trying to say, Mr. Jenkins, is that I am so very grateful to you for taking the time to highlight some of Castle's best features and in turn support what I believe to be the best show ever on television.

--Nicole Bessette

Hi Dr. Jenkins,

I just read your April 6 blog and wanted to share with you this recent post I made on another forum because it relates to your question of what would I ask of the showrunners of Castle (a family favorite in our home).

Interrupting our S/J ship to comment on confirmation. Or shipfirmation. Or...whatever we want to call it. Bear with me, I promise this is not off-topic

I am grading papers this morning while watching (loosely speaking) the last X-Files movie on tv. Now...I was a M/S (Mulder/Scully) diehard shipper. Wrote my fair share of fanfic, read some fabulous fanfic, etc... and like all shippers was clamoring for resolution.

Not that half-a$$ed stuff we got with maybe-babies that were given up, not halfway-hallway kisses (but sexy as all getout in the outtakes of movie 1), no. We wanted 100% "I fell in love with you" dialogue.

And we got it in movie #2.

Now...the next bit should be read with the understanding that not only was I a fan of the show, I worked on the show. My screen name used to be "setmedic," so that should tell you what I did. I worked hard to work on the show, because I loved the show. I tell you this so you can understand my next statement.

Movie #2 was total and utter rubbish. Start to finish.

Fragmented script, go-for-the-gore storyline with no real premise, no characters in which we could put our faith, or commit to, we certainly didn't care about M/S as characters, and they lost all cred (for God's sake, Scully **Googled** stem cell research in looking up treatment options (and seriously...a pathologist doing "cutting-edge" pediatric cancer treatment? Really?)). But, I digress.

But. Earlier in the movie we got a scene in which (strangely reminiscent of the Jack/OTHER scene) in which the camera lifts over Scully's sleeping body to reveal...Mulder. And, just five minutes ago, Scully looked deep into Mulder's eyes and said "This is why I fell in love with you."

Woo. Freaking. Who.

A small, throwaway line that meant...NOTHING.

NOTHING.

No feeling. No chemistry. By this point neither actor was invested in any way in doing the movie other than for financial reasons (yes, I do know this). It wasn't about futhering the story, or the mythology, or an homage to the fans. And it showed in the dry, passionless, "I love you," which may as well been, "That's why I bought cabbage with you."

I do not want our Sam/Jack confirmation to come in the form of a throwaway line in a crappy movie. I would much rather have fanfic and the end-of-the-series-as-we-knew-it Season 8 "Let's not dwell" pier fishing (and we all know it's not about the fishing) scene than a sarcastic, stick-it-to-the-fans tossed-off line.

I, and many of you, have brilliant imaginations and we know the actors love and respect the characters -- nearly as much as do we. I don't believe Brad would put us in the same position Chris Carter did with X-Files, but just in case, I'm laying it out there:

Dear Brad,

Please give us our unequivocal shipfirmation in a lovingly respectful way that enhances and celebrates our characters and does not make them caricatures of themselves or the genre. If that's not possible, please leave it as-is. I'm good with that.

With deepest respect,

Pol

So, Dr. Jenkins, my plea to Andrew Marlowe and Terri Edda would be to use their married relationship as a basis for the dynamic. Or the "couple-age" dynamic of the fabulous writers of the gay family in Modern Family, (and other families in the show) because they have completely nailed those relationships.

In short, Andrew and Terri, take a look around at the fantastic, successful, thriving relationships around you and mine them for the wealth of information they offer. What things do couples struggle over? Money? That's boring. For Castle and Beckett it would be about power. Castle is a typical white male who has money. Lots of money. Lots and lots of money.

What if the Nikki Heat series doesn't do as well as Derek Storm? Is Castle not writing the Beckett he sees? She should be a best-seller.

What if Castle wants to do some real police training? How would that change their dynamic? What if he decides to do the Academy?

Oh, how I'd love to write for them!

Thank you (as always) for the venue and for your fantastic insights.

Best,

Polly

Dear Prof. Jenkins:

Hello! I'm a longtime reader who loved your post on television's allergy to committed relationships, and wanted to add a few thoughts:

- Another shining example from a surprising source: The Vampire Diaries's Stefan and Elena, who have been together 32 episodes and counting. They're high schoolers, but by CW standards, staying together for more than a season = practically married. It's to the writers' credit that the obstacles they've faced as a couple have been much more compelling than the "we're so different and this can never be!!" hand-wringing they went through beforehand, and it highlights a common thread that I think runs throughout the shows that have pulled off successful relationships: respect for stability and loyalty. Elena and Stefan are largely portrayed as a sensible and well-adjusted people, which doesn't preclude disagreements, but eliminates the need to rely on interpersonal conflict to drive the plot. The town's machinations keep them busy enough. I get the sense the writers want them to stay together because there's such a rich story to be mined there, and thus have avoided the willful misunderstandings/distrust/stupidity that have been used to break up other pairings. Stefan and Elena - along with Friday Night Lights's Eric and Tami Taylor, which I'd agree with other posters is the gold standard - run contrary to the conventional wisdom that relationships that hook viewers aren't synonymous with what we want in real life. My corner of fandom would love to life-swap with the Taylors. Give me domesticity any day,

At the same time, I'll acknowledge Beatrice Belli's point that "will they/won't they" works really, really, ridiculously well - so well, in fact, that I'd guess it's one of the elements of a show that's most likely to turn casual viewers into spoiler-seeking, fic-reading, content-producing fans, and writers may be more confident in their abilities to maintain their audience's interest that way - and with good reason, since pulse-pounding depictions of domestic life are so rare and exert a different emotional pull. Not to justify writers' fears, but I think there is something uniquely engaging about UST that's hard to replicate; the tension doesn't go away once characters get together, but it comes packaged in a different form by nature, one where the attraction is no longer so hard-won. I'd be interested in hearing from people whose investment in a TV pairing grew after the protagonists got together after a looooong buildup. Then again, maybe the situation is so dire there wouldn't be any good examples, and that's the problem in the first place!

- I don't watch House, but through fandom osmosis I'd suspect that the writers have taken pains over the years to compound House and Cuddy's respective dysfunctions to keep them apart, which has now backfired in the form of reverting to tired patterns. Your point about showrunners resisting change is well-taken; however, I think what's turned me off of more shows is post-hookup characters becoming unrecognizable. The world's best chemistry can't make up for a lack of caring. I loved Jim and Pam up until season three of The Office, and my losing interest in the show had nothing to do with their getting together. I just didn't like them anymore, separately or together: the once-endearing appreciation society of whispers and pranks they had formed to make through the workday now just seemed petty and mean-spirited, and Pam got flattened into Jim's appendage. That and the plots were about 100x less funny. Same with Chuck and Sarah - I've read praise of how the writers have handled their evolving relationship, but by the time Sarah had been reduced to Chuck's damsel in distress to make it happen, I wanted out. More than anything I wish writers understood that viewers become invested not only in the idea of a relationship, but also in the separate identities two characters bring to the table, their friendships and partnerships with other characters....and the plots that frame all these interactions! I'd rather have writers focus on developing a stable male/female friendship dynamic grounded in respect before plying their audience with romantic tension. Honestly, I'm not sure whether half of the will they/won't they couples on my current shows even like each other. There's one: Leslie and Ben on Parks & Rec. Your description of Castle and Beckett also applies to them: "They clearly are two people who have fun together...and they are people who respect each other's intelligence and creativity." What I love to see in a committed relationship isn't all that different from a great friendship.

- I've never seen a full ep of Castle, but I have a few good friends who love it, and for their sake, television's, and yours, I hope Castle and Beckett achieve that elusive balance: happy but not complacent; steady but not predictable; and not too late in the show's run, when the cases remain fresh and interesting and a worthy canvas for the characters. If I could give the writers any advice, it would be to invest in some good plotting, because the intrigue of a tight mystery does wonders to supplant the tension that fades when the stakes are low. The characters are what keep me watching a show, but too often it seems like showrunners are only willing to take a big step late in the game, when the storylines and dialogue are no longer at their best. I think the long-range format is one of TV's greatest strengths, but I often wonder whether we'd be better off with short-run, UK-style series that allow for more thoughtful planning and a surer sense of direction. But your post makes me hopeful this show will use the format to its advantage, and if Castle manages to combine an ongoing committed relationship with smart cases, I will buy the DVDs so fast I'll leave skid marks.

Thanks for opening up the floor to such a great question! I loved reading the responses, and I hope it's all right mine rambled on for so long. Your work helped convince me to pursue graduate studies in media studies, so it means a lot that you took the time to read this. From one fan to another: thank you!

Best,

Jennifer Shen

A Rant About Television's Difficulty in Representing Committed Relationships

Two things collided over the past week for me as a loyal television viewer and I want to get them off my chest. I give fair warning that this is going to be a bit of a rant. There's almost no aca here and a hell of a lot of fan. The first is that after watching House M.D. with some great pleasure for seven seasons, I am more and more facing the grim reality that it has more or less jumped the shark this season thanks to its frustrating and ill-conceived representation of the on-again, off-again love affair between House and Cuddy.

The second is that I have been more or less inhaling Castle for the past month or so, watching several episodes a night in true "can't eat just one" spirit, having somehow failed to discover it until its third season, and much of what has fueled my passion for this series has been its sophisticated handling of the relationships (all of them in their varied forms and contexts) between the central characters. If you also have not discovered Castle, here's a first season preview which does a good job of spilling out the basic premise.

The contrast between the two series came to a head for me when I read the profile of Castle star Nathan Fillion in the March 25 issue of Entertainment Weekly, a cover story which correctly declared Fillion "Geek God," and which included a side bar asking Castle's two leads whether they think Castle and Beckett should "date or wait." The responses broke down rather predictably along gender lines, with Stana Katic, who plays Beckett, rooting for the two characters to "take it to the next level" and Nathan Fillion worrying that doing so will take much of the passion and tension out of the series. Here's what they each had to say:

Katic: "I might be naively romantic, but I believe that a relationship can be just as spicy when people get together as it was in the chase. The complications that happen when characters like Beckett and Castle get together can make for interesting viewing. They have ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, he has a certain kind of lifestyle and she has a certain kind of lifestyle -- and then on top of that, they actually really care for each other. It would be neat to see how these two people attract each other and drive each other crazy. I'd love to see what happens when Beckett actually touches on a couple of his pet peeves. It would be fun to see her torture him a little bit, you know, in a fun way."

Fillion: "When you get people together, [viewers] stop with the yearning, they stop with the wanting. They go, 'Ah, finally. They're together. All right, what else is on?' I know as an audience member, I enjoy knowing more than the characters I watch on TV know. [With our show it's] looking at these two, saying 'just turn around! She's making the face right now! She's making the face! You'll see it! Ah, you missed it.' The lack of resolution is what keeps people coming back. I think the challenge is how do you serve that so it's not repetitive."

And yes, I know what Fillion's worried about -- he's worried about seeing something like what has happened to House this season. But the problem with House is not that House and Cuddy are in a relationship. The problem is that the writers do not have a clue how to depict a relationship between House and Cuddy in a way which shows any kind of emotional maturity, any kind of psychological depth, and any kind of personal growth.

I often suspect that Hollywood's inability to depict relationships that grow over time has everything to do with the divorce rate in the entertainment capital, very little to do with the constraints of the medium (given how well television depicts the unfolding of interpersonal relationships over time) and even less to do with the desire of fans. (One of the things to pay attention to is how many of the "commitment" episodes for television series are written by a small handful of writers who have consistently ruined every couple they touched.)

From my experience, fandom is all about the relationships between characters, and fans are capable of pulling out insights into those relationships from the most subtle touch, the most nuanced reaction shots, and stitch them together through their stories and videos into stories which show how relationships can grow and unfold over time. Here, for example, a fan re-edits footage from the series to imagine a different kind of relationship between the protagonists.

I've been married for more than thirty years to the same woman (well, actually, neither of us remains the same person from one moment to the next and that's part of what makes marriage such a grand adventure.) My wife remains my best friend, my playmate, my mentor and confident, my sharpest critic and my biggest fan, and living together keeps me constantly on my toes.

This is the kind of relationship which we rarely see on television, again because contemporary writers seem incapable of writing such relationships -- could it be because they are twenty-somethings still recovering from their first major breakup? If I go back to older Hollywood movies, I can see the kinds of relationships I am looking for -- all you have to do is watch any movie which couples Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey or even better, my personal favorite pairing, William Powell and Myrna Loy. Watch how their relationship grows across the full run of The Thin Man series, even, though, gasp, they are together from their very first scenes. There's nothing dull, predictable, passionless, or static about their interactions. It doesn't fall back on House's cynical assumption that people are ultimately incapable of change and thus doomed to disappoint each other.

Part of what gives me confidence that Castle is not going to fall into the traps that House has is that the series itself has shown a close attention to the nuances of character interaction from its first season forward. Certainly, Castle and Beckett have grown closer to each other episode by episode and the writers have been imaginative at finding new ways to deepen their bonds with each other. They clearly are two people who have fun together, which for me is the number one requirement for a meaningful and committed relationship, and they are people who respect each other's intelligence and creativity. The series loves to show them pitching ideas back and forth, often completing each other's intelligence, and they take delight in showing the two very adult characters nevertheless playing with each other, teasing each other with hints of secrets not yet disclosed.

But it isn't just the intense chemistry between the two performers -- and the obvious passion between the two characters which everyone but they seem prepared to acknowledge -- that gives me faith for the future of the relationship. It is also that the series does a great job of depicting other kinds of relationships -- friendships and partnerships such as the one between Ryan and Esposito, mentorships such as the one between Captain Montgomery and Beckett, the father-daughter relationship between Castle and Alexis, the mother-son relationship between Castle and Martha, and even the complexities of relationships which unfold in a single relationships. They recently sprang on us a romance between Esposito and Parish that retrospectively seemed to have been hiding in plain sight all along. There's a powerful sense here that relationships do not just involve the partners but also extend across a larger social network which has a stake in each member's happiness.

And in each of these relationships, at each stage of development, there are hints that the characters involved are more than the sum of their relationships. They are still capable of surprising each other, they have both a history and a future together. This is what keeps me as a fan watching a series long past the point where the genre formulas shaping the stories have become predictable. So, why should the writers or cast worry about their ability to keep the relationship interesting once they move beyond the first blushes of courtship, given that the relationship so far has been so much deeper than teasing the audience about will they or want they?

Given the range and complexity of these relationships, there are surely many different dimensions of the life between Castle and Beckett the writers can pull out, many different things they can learn from and about each other, and many ways that their relationship can be implicated in the mysteries they solve. Of all of the shows currently on television, I think Castle has the best potential to show me the kind of committed couple that I long to see, and I am not alone as the broad range of fan videos and fan stories about these characters suggest.

There's something else which gives me hope that Castle might achieve this kind of representation of dating and married life - the other great couple currently on genre television, Elizabeth and Peter Burke on White Collar, another series currently on my Tivo, although alas, due to USA Network's short seasons, there's a painfully long wait before I'll see any new episodes. White Collar is another fannish show which lives and dies on the basis of character entanglements, entanglements which again go well beyond romance.

Here's a segment from a recent Paley Center event where a woman of the audience asks the program stars and producers about the intense bonds between the series male protagonists, Neal and Peter, and gets some interesting insights in return.

And there's another whole thesis to be written about Neal's other great friendships with his long-time partner, Mozzie, and with his sophisticated landlady, June, played by the great Diane Carroll. And I've been enjoying watching the sexy partnerships between Neal and his sometimes paramours, Alex and Sara. But above all, what I love about White Collar is its depictions of the domestic life between Peter and Elizabeth. Elizabeth (Tiffani Thiessen) doesn't get a lot of screen time: she may only be in a scene or two per episode, and due to the actress's maternity leave, she missed out a good chunk of the first half of the season, but when they are together, there is a playfulness and mutual respect which from where I sit show the signs of a happily married couple.

They know each other well. They call each other out on their nonsense. But there's no question that they would do anything for each other. Elizabeth is smart and she's intelligent, not always the same thing; she's got her own thoughts and her own life; she's not a simple appendage of her husband. And it is precisely because their relationship is complex and unpredictable and constantly evolving that it becomes a catalyst shaping the interactions with the other characters. Witness the Paley Center audience member's acknowledgment that part of what strengthens the friendship between Neal and Peter is that Peter is seeking Neal's advice on how to be a better husband.

Here's a fan video which does a great job in conveying some of what I value about White Collar's depiction of their marriage, again by cobbling together little bits that show a much bigger picture.

So, let me turn the floor over to my readers now. What do you see as the best representations of committed relationships on American television? Which couples demonstrate the capacity for trust and growth which has been sadly lacking on this season's House? What advice would you give to the showrunners at Castle about how they might intensify the relationship between Castle and Beckett without lowering the tension or diminishing audience engagement?

I know the comments function on this blog is more or less broken due to the intense spam protection I've had to put on here. So, if you don't want to fight with the submission process, send me e-mail directly at hjenkins@usc.edu and I will make sure it goes up on this site. But, tell me, what would you most like to teach the show runner of your choice about the care and feeding of actual human characters involved in committed relationships?

Over the Rainbow: John C. Tibbetts Opens Archive of Interviews

Over the past year or so, I've been enjoying an active correspondence with John C. Tibbetts, a long-standing film researcher, who recently put out a three volume collection of highlights from American Classic Screen, a publication which in its day represented an important bridge between the world of film buffs and cineastes, on the one hand, and film scholars on the other. For a period of time, academic film scholars seemed eager to burn some of these bridges, gaining academic respectability at the expense of cutting themselves off from fans and journalists who shared their passions for film. Tibbetts is one of the film scholars who has kept these bridges very much in tact, working through the years as a practicing journalist, as well as teaching at the University of Kansas. He's recently opened a remarkable website which showcases several decades worth of interviews with some of the top creative talents of the era, one which as he explains below is fearless in bridging high and low and cutting across a range of different media. Whatever your interests, there is sure to be material here which will be invaluable to you. "OVER THE RAINBOW": A STATEMENT BY JOHN C. TIBBETTS, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

I want to thank Henry Jenkins for this opportunity to welcome you to my new website, "Over the Rainbow," administered through the University of Kansas. It contains hundreds of my video and audio interviews spanning 35 years with pop and classical figures in the arts and humanities. The address is: kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/6581. Now in progress, and accessible to scholars, fans, and enthusiasts, "Over the Rainbow" has grown to more than sixty video interviews and soon will include hundreds more video and audio interviews. Eventually, they will be accompanied by brief annotations and illustrations to alert the viewer/reader to their contents.

How did I gain access to these interviews (I prefer to call them "conversations")? Opportunities for contacts were numerous. Before gaining my tenure as an associate professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas in 1998, I worked as a full-time radio and television broadcaster and free-lance journalist for CBS television, the Christian Science Monitor radio network and newspaper, Voice of America, National Public Radio, and several classical music radio stations. At the same time I edited the National Film Society's house magazine, American Classic Screen.

A NOTE ABOUT THE INTERVIEWS

These conversations encompass the worlds of "classical" and "pop" culture, with artists and performers "high" and "low," from the scholar's studio to "drive-by" encounters on the road--at backstage rehearsals, in private homes, movie premieres, music festivals, academic conferences, science fiction/horror cons, etc. As you will see, it could be argued that I have shown little discrimination in these subjects, be they "high" and "low," or somewhere in between. So be it. That's the world we live in; the media borders are porous. As Henry Jenkins has declared, "Today we are trying. . . to build bridges, to open larger conversations, and to join forces with fans and industry alike as we explore the new directions being taken within media culture."

Thus--to cite a few examples of these "bridges,"--you will find here conversations about music with blues man "Screamin'" Jay Hawkins" in a Kansas City bar and with opera star Luciano Pavarotti in the back of a luxury limousine. There are talks about gothic horror with popular novelists Stephen King and Robert (Psycho) Bloch; and with academics Professors Richard (The Age of Wonder) Holmes and Harold Schechter (The Bosom Serpent). Composer Jerry Goldsmith talks about composing for Star Trek, and "classical composer" Virgil Thomson remembers composing for Orson Welles and Robert Flaherty. Jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal and classical violinist Nigel Kennedy demonstrate techniques of improvisation. Comic book artist Bob Kane talks about creating Batman, and award-winning children's book illustrator Chris Van Allsburg remembers writing The Polar Express and Jumanji. Movie soundtrack composer Ry Cooder and Professor Charles Hamm trace American blues traditions to 19th-century African-American roots. Hollywood mainstream directors James Cameron and Tim Burton talk about Aliens and Batman, and international filmmakers Bernardo Bertolucci and Peter Weir discuss their work in the Italian and Australian "New Waves."

While on the road, like a modern-day flaneur, I've always kept my microphones and cameras at the ready. I found Ray Bradbury at Disney's WED studios while working on EPCOT's "Spaceship Earth"; Robert Altman at Kansas City's fabled 18th and Vine locations while shooting Kansas City; concert pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy backstage at a Duesseldorf concert hall after a recital; historian Kevin Brownlow in the basement of his London Photoplay offices while finishing his documentary, The Tramp and the Dictator; Chevy Chase at a barbecue on the rim of the Grand Canyon after finishing National Lampoon Vacation; Jeremy Brett backstage in a West End theater before a performance of The Mystery of Sherlock Holmes; Arthur Conan Doyle's daughter, Dame Jean Bromet, in her London flat dispensing tea and cakes while recalling her father's forays into Spiritualism. George Burns in a Las Vegas casino while talking about Oh, God!; and slugger Bo Jackson in the Kansas City Royals dugout before a ballgame.

Inevitably, there are those deliciously unexpected incidents that flavor many of these conversations. Tape recorder in hand, I follow Maurice Sendak backstage while he paints scenery for a performance of the opera version of Where the Wild Things Are. I accompany Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder to the Smithsonian Institute, where they gaze in rapt amazement at the installation of the "Fiftieth Anniversary of Superman" display. Venerable concert pianist Charles Rosen interrupts our talk with a sudden discourse on Hollywood "B" movies. I clamber aboard the Memphis Belle B-17 bomber (now housed at Mud Island, near Memphis) with members of the original crew during on-site conversations about their participation in William Wyler's titular 1943 documentary classic. I watch while Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. illustrates his swashbuckling memories of working with Max Ophuls on The Exile by brandishing a sword he kept in his apartment's umbrella stand. I listened while an ageing Adriana Casellotti (the voice of Disney's Snow White) punctuates her memories of the film with shrill reprises of "Someday My Prince Will Come." While talking about Back to the Beach, Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon suddenly launch into their "Beach Party" theme song. A stark naked Tony Bennett changes costumes during a photo shoot in Los Angeles. Kermit the Frog likewise appears nude (courtesy of Jim Henson's open hand) when he interrupts Henson's remarks about Sesame Street. Instead of closing our conversation about The Color Purple with the traditional handshake, Steven Spielberg extends his hands for a quick game "patty-cake. Look closely, and you'll see Debra Winger punctuating her remarks by munching on a potted plant. Brian Dennehy responds to my invitation to offer career advice to his young co-star, Tyrone Power, Jr., in Cocoon 2 with these immortal words: "Use a little less lip gloss, kid!" Avant-garde composer John Cage finds sudden inspiration for a discourse on "found music" when an ice cream truck tinkles out its melodies below our window. And my tape recorder is rolling while Clarence "Ducky" Nash (the voice of Donald Duck) breaks up a restaurant crowd with one of Donald's squawking tantrums.

The old adage that the bigger they are the nicer they are certainly holds true in my experience. Tops on my list of Good Guys are directors Ron Howard and Richard Donner; actors Michael Caine, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas, Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Bridges, and DeForest Kelly ("Bones" on Star Trek); academics Jacques Barzun and Susan Sontag; and ragtime composer Max Morath and opera composer William Bolcom. In particular, I'll never forget my many interviews with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Long ago, during his Conan the Barbarian days, Arnold's consummate professionalism and his love of publicity already marked him as a born politician. The losers. . . well, discretion bids me hold my tongue, but can you spell T-0-M-M-Y L-E-E J-O-N-E-S?

A NOTE ON MY AUTOGRAPHED PORTRAITS

Soon to accompany the interviews on the "Over the Rainbow" web site are hundreds of my sketches and paintings of the interview subjects. This hobby--or whatever it is--began long ago in 1966 when author Ray Bradbury inscribed my portrait of him with greetings from the characters in his stories. Not only did that launch a friendship I cherish to this day (Ray is in his late 80s now), but I was inspired to capture more likenesses and inscriptions. They now number more than 300 images.

My portraits have had their advantages during my interviews. Sometimes they triggered unexpected conversations with the subjects. Gene Hackman showed me some of the sketches he makes between takes on the movie set, and Julie Andrews and Whoopi Goldberg confessed what they really want to do is write children's books. Maybe strangest of all, Broadway superstar Mary Martin told me that she paints portraits too! But not the conventional views of faces; no, she's talking about drawing the backs of their heads. "You see," she explained, "when I was on stage during the run of The Sound of Music, I got to know the Von Trapp kids by the backs of their heads during the "do-re-mi" song. So I gave them each a drawing of the backs of their heads. And since then, I've given all my friends portraits of the backs of their heads. It's become my trademark! I also blush to admit that in swaps for my art work, fantasy illustrator Joseph Mugnaini doodled fantastic designs on my Hollywood hotel stationery, Bob ("Batman") Kane tossed off a drawing of the Dynamic Duo in the bar of the Sheraton-Universal Hotel, and Chuck Jones dashed off a Daffy Duck/ "Scarlet Pumpernickle" drawing in his Hollywood office.

I welcome all of you to visit my web site at the University of Kansas. You may find a few insights and provocations amidst some of the laughs and tom-foolery.

John C. Tibbetts (tibbetts@ku.edu)

John C. Tibbetts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas, where he teaches courses in film history, media studies, and theory and aesthetics. His most recent books are Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography (2005, Yale University Press), Schumann: A Chorus of Voices (2010, Amadeus Press), and the three-volume American Classic Screen (Scarecrow Press, 2010). Forthcoming is Voices of Wonder: Conversations on Classic Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror.

How Learners Can Be On Top of Their Game: An Interview with James Paul Gee (Part One)

James Paul Gee from New Learning Institute on Vimeo.

On April 4, I will be respondent for the Pullias Lecture, being hosted by the Rossier School of Education here at the University of Southern California. The primary speaker is James Paul Gee, who is going to address "Games, Learning, and the Looming Crisis of Higher Education." For those in the Los Angeles area, the talk is being held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC, 4-6 PM.

I was delighted to be asked to participate in this exchange, both because I was recently given an honorary appointment in the Rossier School and because I have such affection and respect for Gee. We've known each other for the better part of a decade now. We've appeared together many times, often in informal conversational settings, I like to call "The Jim and Henry Show," where we talk about our shared interests in participatory culture, games and learning, and the new media literacies. Gee has been one of the key thinkers about the kinds of new pedogogical models represented by computer and video games, seeing them as illustrating alternative forms of learning to those represented by our current schooling practices. Gee has been one of the core contributors to the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative, helping to inspire a whole new generation of educational researchers, who are doing serious work not only on games but also modding, machinema, fan fiction, virtual worlds, and a range of other new media platforms and practices.

This semester, I have ended up teaching Gee's recent book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, in my New Media Literacies class. I was delighted when I first saw the book to see Gee expand upon his thinking about "affinity spaces" to think more deeply about what he and his co-author Elizabeth Hayes call "gaming beyond gaming." The term refers to the broad range of productive and social practices which have grown up around games, practices which strongly parallel what I've found in my own research on fan cultures. The book's focus on The Sims signals the importance of this game both as a breakthrough title which expanded female interest in the medium and as a model for all subsequent games which have encouraged players to build and share content with each other. Gee and Hayes are interested in the ways this game has become the jumping off place for lifelong learning processes for a range of women, young and old. It is a delightful mixture of compelling storytelling and thoughtful analysis, one which can easily be assigned to undergraduate students but which is profound enough to capture the imagination of advanced students and researchers.

As I was anticipating our mutual participation in the Pullias Lecture event, it occurred to me that I had never interviewed Gee for my blog, despite all of our other interactions through the years. What follows includes his reflections on the current state of games-based learning research, the state of American education, and the value of participatory culture. Gee was generous with his thoughts and so I am going to be running this meaty exchange over three installments this week.

We've both been involved in thinking about games and learning for the better part of a decade. What do you see as the most significant breakthroughs which have occurred over this time?

The breakthroughs have been slower in coming than I had hoped. Like many new ideas, the idea of games for learning (better, "games as learning") has been often co-opted by entrenched paradigms and interests, rather than truly transforming them. We see now a great many skill-and-drill games, games that do in a more entertaining fashion what we already do in school. We see games being recruited in workplaces--and lots of other instances of "gamification"--simply to make the current structures of exploitation and traditional relationships of power more palatable. We will see the data mining capacities of games and digital media in general recruited for supervision, rather than development. The purpose of games as learning (and other game-like forms of learning) should be to make every learner a proactive, collaborative, reflective, critical, creative and innovative problem solver; a producer with technology and not just a consumer; and a fully engaged participant and not just a spectator in civic life and the public sphere.

In general there are two "great divides" in the games and learning arena. The two divides are based on the learning theories underlying proposals about games for learning. The first divide is this: On the one hand, there are games based on a "break everything into bits and practice each bit in its proper sequence" theory of learning, a theory long popular in instructional technology. Let's call this the "drill and practice theory". On the other hand, there are games based on a "practice the bits inside larger and motivating goal-based activities of which they are integral parts" theory. Let's call this the "problem-and-goals-centered theory". I espouse one version of this theory, but, unfortunately, there are two versions of it. And this is the second divide: On the one hand, there is a "mindless progressive theory" that says just turn learners loose to immerse themselves in rich activities under the steam of their own goals. This version of progressivism (and progressivism in Dewey's hands was not "mindless") has been around a great many years and is popular among "mindless" educational liberals. On the other hand, the other version of the "problem-and-goals-centered theory" claims that deep learning is achieved when learners are focused on well designed, well ordered, and well mentored problem solving with shared goals, that is, goals shared with mentors and a learning community.

Like so many other areas of our lives today, the conservative version (drill and practice) and the liberal version (mindless progressivism) are both wrong. The real solution does not lie in the middle, but outside the space carved up by political debates.

What do you think remain the biggest misunderstandings or disagreements in this space?

Much of what I discussed above is really not about misunderstandings, but about disagreements and different beliefs and value systems, or, in some cases, different political, economic, or cultural vested interests. The biggest misunderstanding in the case of my own work has been people saying that my work espouses games for learning. It does not and never has. It espouses "situated embodied learning", that is learning by participation in well designed and well mentored experiences with clear goals; lots of formative feedback; performance before competence; language and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; and lots of talk and interaction around strategies, critique, planning, and production within a "passionate affinity space" (a type of interest-driven group) built to sustain and extend the game or other curriculum. Games are one good way to do this. There are many others.

The biggest misunderstanding in general is that technologies (like games, television, movies, and books) are good or bad. They are neither. They are good, bad, or indifferent based on how they are used in the contexts in which they are used. By themselves they are inert, though they do have certain affordances. Games for learning work pretty much the same way as books for learning. Kids learn with books or games (or television or computers or movies or pencils) when they are engaged in well designed and good interactions with adults and more advanced peers, interactions that lead to problem solving, meta-critical reflection, and connections to the world and other texts and tools. They learn much less in other circumstances. But we must humbly admit that humans have never yet found a technology more powerful than print. The number of people who have killed others or aided them in the name of a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Turner Diaries, Silent Spring) is vastly larger than those who have killed or helped in the name of a game, movie, or television show. Of course, this may change, but it does little good, in the interim, to pretend books are benign, but games are inherently perilous.

From the start, you were less interested in designing games for teaching than in using principles of game design that are grounded in educational research to reimagine the pedagogical process? To what degree do you think recent projects such as Quest to Learn have embodied those insights?

I see game design and learning design (what a good professional teacher does) as inherently similar activities. The principles of "good games" and of "good learning" are the same, by and large. This is so, of course, because games are just well designed problem-solving spaces with feedback and clear outcomes and that is the most essential thing for real, deep, and consequential learning. These principles include (among others): making clear what identity the learning requires; making clear why anyone would want to do such learning; making clear how the learning will function to lead to problem solving and mastery; making the standards of achievement high and clear, but reachable with persistence; early successes; a low cost of failure that encourages exploration, risk taking, and trying out new styles; lots of practice of basic skills inside larger goal-based and motivating activities; creating and then challenging routine mastery at different levels to move learners upwards; using information and texts "just in time" and "on demand"; performance before competence (doing as a way of learning and being); getting learners to think like designers and to be able themselves to design; encouraging collaboration and affiliation with what is being learned as part of an identity and passion one shares with others; good mentoring by other people, as well as smart tools and technologies.

These principles can be realized in many ways, not one. Chibi-Robo, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Quest to Learn all realize them, though Quest to Learn faces the vast stupidity of our current accountability regime and Chibi-Robo and Yu-Gi-Oh do not.

James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005, Third Edition 2011) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent books are Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007); Woman as Gamers: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) and Language and Learning in the Digital World (2011), both written with Elizabeth Hayes. Prof. Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part Three)

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following is an interview with Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org in which he responds to my questions about the anime fan scene.
Many get confused by the superficial resemblances between Fan Vids and Anime Music Vids. Though both are expressions of fan appreciation, they come from very different traditions. How would you describe the similarities and differences between the two?

For this question, I asked AbsoluteDestiny, who started making AMVs in 2001, and switched to making vids in 2005. He's much more familiar with the vidding community than I am, but also has familiarity with the AMV community in order to compare. He wrote:

Henry's question is a really huge one and one I've actually given a lot of thought. There was a time, in the 2vcr days of both vidding and amvs, where there were a lot of similarities between the videos made in the two communities. Hair by Media Cannibals is largely the same vid as Hair by You Know Who, albeit with different gender gazes. As the communities, skills and aesthetics developed, the respective videos started to diverge. The reasons for this are a mixture of three important factors:

1) How the source is read and enjoyed

2) How the source lends itself to video editing techniques

3) What kinds of videos the communities give praise (and reward) to

In very very broad terms, the vidding community grew out of media fandom's more narrative side, fan-fiction and so on, with a strong emphasis on character over genre. Anime fandom, on the other hand, is largely interested in genre, spectacle, Japanese culture and self-referentiality. These differing priorities tend to different subjects for videos - Wonder of Birds (Laura Shapiro) versus AMV Hell (Zarxrax) to take two extremes.

Then we have the very nature of the source. Scenes in anime are not emotionally subtle - visually, especially in TV anime. Much of the emotional nuance is carried by the voice acting and only the more emphasised visual emotions (joy, anger, embarrassment) remain when the footage is removed from its audio. So where vidding can rely on the superbly nuanced body language of the actors, anime can really only pull on whatever aesthetic flourish the source gave them (flowers, blushing, thought bubbles with super-deformed characters beating each other up etc). To do subtle emotion with anime is hard and it's not unknown to rely on external manipulation (such as Playground Love by Nathan Bezner). Thankfully, animation lends itself to external manipulation very well and roto-scoping the footage and puppeteering it to do your bidding is not out of the realm of possibility, which allows for original narratives that are still very much in the spirit of anime (with its genre, spectacle, culture and meta fixations).

Lastly we have the community and how their reception of the works develop and refine aesthetics. The AMV community learned to walk at conventions and even in the early days of Anime Expo and Otakon a formal structure for AMV exposition was created in the form of the contest. Categorisation and the need to find ways to compare highly subjective works led to the formation of AMV genres and a fond regard for technical proficiency (being something that is much more objective when judging a video's quality). While the explosive growth of the community towards the mid 2000s did introduce all kinds of new aesthetics, the major genre categorisation and the search for technical wonders moved amv work further to the side of original spectacle, sometimes very disconnected from the narratives of the sources being used. Ultimately, however, it is a combination of all three elements here that have created the communities we have and the output they produce.

There are wonderful oddities and outliers on both sides but the kinds of work you are likely to find largely fit into the following spectrum:

Vidding tends toward deep analysis of character and show and utilisation of interior movement where amvs tend toward meta, spectacle and genre works with a strong utilisation of external motion, footage, effects and original art.

I've also vaguely plotted some well-known videos (though the amvs totally show my age) onto the graph. It's very rough but this should give an idea as to how I see the whole amv vs vidding spectrum.

[Titles in black are vids, titles in blue are AMVs]

Your account of AMV focuses on their American origins. Are such vids part of the Otaku tradition in Japan or is this a distinctly western response to Anime? If the former, what kinds of contact exists between the artists in the two countries? If the later, is the AMV being picked up by Japanese fans as well?

Learning about hobbyist video editing by fans in Japan and sharing ideas is difficult due to the language barrier. Remix videos in Japan that we're familiar with are called MADs, since one of the early tapes was labelled "Kichigai Tape", or "Tape of Madness". There are many different types of MADs, but early on the AMV community was exposed to a number of Seishiga MADs (and to many, "MAD" came to be a term with only this narrow definition), where still images, often from dating games or visual novels, have motion and other effects applied to them. This creates a distinct aesthetic that was emulated by some North American AMV creators such as VicBond007 in his Believe AMV.

In 2005, one MAD editor named pianos (interview from 2004) came to Anime Weekend Atlanta with a translator, and showed the audience MADs made by him and other editors at his panel. Some of them can be difficult to understand, again due to the language barrier, but there was one short MAD I came across years ago that I liked so much, I remade it for an English-speaking audience.

It used to be fairly difficult to find MADs. I stumbled across some videos where the files were split up between hosts to avoid bandwidth and space limitations. Later on, I came across a collection of them on Usenet. Now you can find Japanese fan videos on Nico Nico Douga, but of course it's a Japanese site so it can be difficult to navigate. Some of them get uploaded to YouTube so you can see them there. They can be hard to find since MAD is a common English word, but you can try searching for "Nico Nico MAD" to find some examples. Several MADs consist of anime-inspired custom artwork, which is relatively rare in AMVs. (Some exceptions: Greed vs. Envy, Utena Daioh, Woolongs For Nothing)

What functions do AMV play within the fan community? Are they primarily consumed by existing fans of the program or are they part of the process of educating American fans about Japanese media content?

A little of both. As I wrote in the first segment, fans at AMV panels at conventions have often indicated that they've bought anime after seeing it in an AMV. For those that are already fans of a particular show, today's search engines make it easy to find an AMV that uses that show.

Now, however, the internet also makes it much easier to find both licensed and unlicensed copies of anime, so I have a feeling that the promotional impact of the hobby is now less than it used to be. Though in some cases, editors seek out shows that haven't been licensed here yet, possibly in order to be the first to use a high-quality new title.

What kinds of relationship exists between the AMV creators and the commercial and semi-commercial groups who are marketing anime in this country?

Views on the hobby depend on which company representative you talk to. I heard of one anime convention panel with ADV Films where one of their employees told Brad DeMoss that they loved his Evangelion/Star Wars Episode I parody. The company, while it existed, was also AMV-friendly in other ways, with employees helping to judge at Iron Editor events. Also, for the final DVD of their release of the Noir series, they contacted four AMV editors, including myself, to create videos to include as Easter eggs on the disc. This took some wrangling on their part with the rights holders in Japan, and due to rights issues we were only allowed to use the opening and ending songs from the show, but it was a pretty cool thing of them to do.

On the other hand, reportedly at the closing ceremonies of Anime Expo one year, a Japanese guest of honour was upset when they played an AMV that incorporated one of his works. I'm not sure who the guest was, but AX stopped playing AMVs at their closing ceremonies after that.

For one final example, Anime Tourist reported on a 2002 interview done with Hiroyuki Yamaga, Co-Founder of Gainax and his friend Takami Akai.

Audience question: What is your opinion on anime music videos from a company standpoint and from a personal standpoint? Have you seen any anime music videos?

Mr. Yamaga: What exactly do you mean?

AQ: Like the anime music videos that we are going to be showing tonight?

Mr. Yamaga: I like them a lot. I think that they are very well done.

Mr. Akai: I didn't know that they existed. I actually like them personally.

Mr. Yamaga: I feel that copyrighting is only for professionals. For people who are doing it for their own enjoyment as a hobby, I feel that the line is very blurry. The reason that copyright laws are so strict is because it is very difficult to make the distinction whether or not someone is professional or amateur. But as Gainax, they got their start doing similar stuff so it's very hard for them to say, "No, We won't allow that'. They also feel that they don't really want to say that. As Gainax, the corporation, they have to say, 'No, we haven't seen it', 'Nope, haven't heard about it'. That is how they deal with it.

I've also heard this "willful ignorance" position from some in the North American industry. (again, from a professional standpoint) Though I've heard of at least one employee calling them a "headache", AMVs and the North American anime industry seem to coexist reasonably peacefully.

Tim Park programs videogames by day, and helps to administrate AnimeMusicVideos.org at night. The site has been online for over ten years and catalogs over 100,000 AMVs. He's edited a few dozen AMVs (and one vid) under the name Doki Doki Productions.

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part Two)

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following selection of Anime Music Vids was curated and commented upon by Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org.
Only Bob - by Infinity Squared

Although plenty of interesting results can be made by simply mashing up anime and music, some editors like to push themselves and try to incorporate elements of other mediums into their work. In this example, original CGI is combined with anime to portray a robot pondering what it means to be human.

The following videos were also considered for the event:

A Little Retrospect - by Kitsuner

Using footage from other AMVs is often frowned upon in the community. This is partly because the North American anime industry is still quite small (ie: compared to Hollywood) and if you're going to use some footage, you should support them by buying the DVD. In the case of this video, however, Kitsuner deliberately picked scenes from over 60 AMVs that span a decade to show "how far we've come". (The Strongbad parody clip saying you can use all the AMVs you already have came from Road to Iron Chef)

AMV Minis Episode 3 - compiled by Zarxrax

(Embedding of this video has been disabled. You can view it on YouTube)

Ever since the first one, the AMV Hell series has been hugely popular, with showings of some of the hour-long projects routinely filling screening rooms at conventions. The general idea is, an editor may think a certain part of a song would be a funny pairing with a certain part of an anime, but the joke wouldn't be funny for the entire length of the song. Collect enough of these ideas and put them together Short-Attention-Span-Theatre-style, and you have AMV Hell. It's spawned countless imitators and homages, even in machinima in the form of HMV Hell, based on the Halo game franchise. Zarxrax kept saying he'd retire the AMV Hell series, but its spirit lives on in this shorter-form of the popular rapid-fire comedy shorts. Things are often hit-or-miss based on your sense of humour and knowledge of cultural references, but this was one of my favourite compilations of AMV Minis Season One.

Continuous Play - by Ileia

Although repeated scenes may be a symptom of a lack of effort in a video, it works strikingly well here with the song "Stuck On Repeat". Also, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time has scenes that are similar in composition but with different elements or palettes, which makes the video less repetitive and more visually appealing.

Lawl & Order: Legal Tender - by Fall_Child42

Some videos are closer to short stories or parodies than actual music videos. This one tells the story of the criminal justice system. This video was originally done for an Iron Editor event, but Fall_Child42 went on to improve and complete the video after the event.

Time - by qwaqa

qwaqa alters footage from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time to tell his own story of a girl who fixes the past. A "making of" video is directly below, so you can see the work that went into altering footage from the movie.

Kawaii Girls: Ultimate Dating Simulator - by Fizziks

This is a fake parody ad making fun of the Japanese dating simulator game phenomenon.
(Short glossary: kawaii / mecha /moe /otaku)

Attack of the Otaku - by Chiikaboom

After Odorikuruu practically defined the upbeat dance video, there have been constant attempts to one-up videos in the genre with more effects and fun footage. One editor even claimed that he wanted to create an "Odorikuruu killer". This more recent entry to the field makes references to Koopiskeva's prior work, Skittles. One effect on display is masking, or isolating an anime character and removing the background in order to put a character in another scene, or in front of some other effects. Chiikaboom wrote in the video description: "It takes a good 20-30 minutes to mask out one frame. There were 482 frames. Do the math." (And that was just for one scene. A total of 904 frames were masked)

Auriga - by Nostromo

Nostromo specializes in dance videos with electronic music, but instead of cute or fun scenes like in Attack of the Otaku, he typically uses scenes with a higher quality of animation and art than most budget anime TV shows for a different aesthetic. Interestingly, he also used software to interpolate frames, creating more in-between frames for an even smoother look. A description of the process, and higher quality versions of the video are available on the video's profile page.

Twilight - by Koopiskeva

In a similar vein to Only Bob, above, Koopiskeva combines Kanon with original live action footage. The video was inspired by one of the characters asking another, "Have you ever wondered that perhaps we were living in someone else's dream?"

A Feel-Good AMV - by haunter103

What can I say? It's a feel-good AMV! :)

The following videos were made in 2010, too late to be considered for the event:

The Friend Request - by Moonlight Soldier

Here Moonlight Soldier explores anime relationships via Facebook. There are a number of anime and editor in-jokes here, but you should be able to get something out of it. In this video, the female singer is actually speaking for the boy, since Shinji Ikari, the male lead in Evangelion, is portrayed as a bit of a wimp. Other AMVs have also used female voices for him, such as Kevin Caldwell's Engel.

Every Anime Opening Ever Made - by Derek Lieu

This supercut compilation video illustrates how anime opening sequences share

a lot of elements between them, from composition to effects.

RAH HEY! - by Ileia

Cleverly based on the similarity between the pronunciations of "anime" and "enemy" (at least when sung by Green Day), this is a fun "can you name them all" compilation video which includes composites of anime with editing and social networking software.

Tim Park programs videogames by day, and helps to administrate AnimeMusicVideos.org at night. The site has been online for over ten years and catalogs over 100,000 AMVs. He's edited a few dozen AMVs (and one vid) under the name Doki Doki Productions.

DIY Media 2010: Anime Music Videos (Part One)

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of curated selections of DIY Video prepared in relation to the screening of DIY Video 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and organized by Mimi Ito, Steve Anderson, and the good folks at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The following curator's statement was written by Tim Park from AnimeMusicVideos.org. As far as the AMV community is aware, the first Anime Music Videos were created by Jim Kaposztas in 1982. He was inspired by MTV, back when they played music videos. Anime had a slow growth in North America, with few options before the '90s for shows licensed and released in English. Fans would trade tapes recorded by friends in Japan, and often translated into English and subtitled by other fans. Many times there would be some extra room at the end of the tape and so as not to waste any, occasionally people would record AMVs after the show.

To some extent, AMVs have helped advertise the shows that they contain. At AMV panels at anime conventions, when audiences are asked if they've ever bought an anime based on an AMV that they've seen, most hands go up. Apparently when Hold Me Now was shown at Anime Boston, the dealers room sold out of Princess Tutu shortly thereafter.

Before the rise of digital distribution, another common way to see AMVs was at anime conventions. Rather than simply screen them, tradition was that the videos would compete in a contest, perhaps because one of the other most popular events at conventions, cosplay, is also most commonly in the form of a contest. Every year, AMVs shown at Anime Expo and Otakon are seen by thousands of fans, and they can vote for their favourites. (Though in some cases, contests are evaluated by a judging panel) Anime Weekend Atlanta was the first convention to have a 24-hour room dedicated to AMVs for the entire con, and a couple of others have followed suit.

And so, unlike most of the other genres presented at the DIY festival, much of the AMV community is steeped in competition, with multiple rating systems available to grade and evaluate videos at AnimeMusicVideos.org.

One of the reasons for these systems was to help the site's creator (and others) to find good AMVs. There are even "Iron Editor" competitions where two editors have to make the best video they can in two hours with a few predetermined shows... and a secret ingredient of course.

It's not all competition, however. Ever since the first Dance Dance Revolution Project in 2001, where almost 20 editors came together to create a dance mix AMV over an hour long, there have been many cases of people coming together to create something more than just one person could manage. They're called Multi-Editor Projects, or MEPs, and there's also a sub-forum on AnimeMusicVideos.org to help people organize them. Themes for MEPs can include bands, emotions, holidays, or even numbers stations.

When selecting videos for consideration to be shown at the recent DIY festival,

most were released in 2008-2009.

Videos shown at the DIY 24/7 2010 program:

(With the exception of the YouTube embeds, if you click on the small "link" chain icon in the videos, you'll be taken to the video's profile page at AnimeMusicVideos.org. There you'll find more information on the anime and music used, and any other details about the video that the editor wanted to convey)

I'm On A Blimp (ft. Teddy) - by LittleKuriboh

LittleKuriboh is known for his Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series videos, which consist of abbreviated episodes of the Yu-Gi-Oh anime re-dubbed with humourous dialog. This video parodies The Lonely Island's "I'm On A Boat" with Yu-Gi-Oh footage, but unlike most AMVs, the original song's lyrics have been revised and performed by the creators, in the manner of filk songs. (Another notable example of AMV creators doing their own singing is the Iron Chef Idol series of videos)

Ian Fleming's Property of a Lady - by qwaqa

There are several instances of AMV editors making faux openings or trailers for existing movies or TV shows. In this case, using Noir, Cowboy Bebop, a few other shows, and a lot of editing, qwaqa creates a fake James Bond-style opening for Ian Fleming's story, "Property of a Lady".

AMV Technique Beat - by Douggie

Also called an "AMV For Dummies" (ie: a how-to book video) in the title card, Douggie illustrates a number of techniques and considerations that go into making an AMV. The title is a reference to the "Technique Beat" trilogy of videos by Decoy.

Tim Park programs videogames by day, and helps to administrate AnimeMusicVideos.org at night. The site has been online for over ten years and catalogs over 100,000 AMVs. He's edited a few dozen AMVs (and one vid) under the name Doki Doki Productions.

The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Four): Why Fans Matter

The final section of The Survival of Soap Opera focuses on the evolution of fan community practices online, on various soap opera fan experiences/demographics, and on relations between the soap opera industry and its fans. Below, a variety of the contributors to this section answer questions about the relationships fans have with the soap operas they watch and with one another. Tom Casiello is a current member of the writing team for The Young and the Restless, a former associate head writer for One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives, and a two-time Daytime Emmy Award-winning writer with As the World Turns who has written about the genre at his blog, Damn the Man! Save the Empire.

Abigail De Kosnik is an assistant professor at the University of California-Berkeley in the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies who writes on media, fandom, and copyright. As editor of the collection, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also wrote an essay in the collection, entitled "Soaps for Tomorrow: Media Fans Making Online Drama from Celebrity Gossip. C.

Lee Harrington is professor of sociology and a Women's Studies Program Affiliate at Miami University is co-author of the book Soap Fans and who has written on the soap opera genre since the late 1980s for publications including The Journal of Aging Studies, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, and Transformative Works and Cultures. As one of the book's co-editors, she co-wrote the book's introduction, "The Crisis of Daytime Drama and What It Means for the Future of Television." She also co-authored a piece for the book with Denise Brothers, entitled "Constructing the Older Audience: Age and Aging in Soaps."

Roger Newcomb is the Editor-in-Chief of soap opera news site We Love Soaps, the producer of two Internet radio soap operas, and executive producer and co-writer of the film Manhattanites. His essay in the book is entitled "As the World Turns' Luke and Noah and Fan Activism."

Radha O'Meara is a doctoral candidate and lecturer in screen studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, who has published her work in Screwball Television: Gilmore Girls and in the Austrian journal Metro. Her essay in the book is entitled "The 'Missing Years': How Local Programming Ruptured Days of Our Lives in Australia."

Julie Porter is a longtime newspaper editor and reporter who is webmaster of soap opera site talk!talk!. Her essay in the collection is entitled "Hanging on by a Common Thread."

QueenEve is the pseudonym of a career professional and soap opera fan who has moderated and/or founded several popular soap communities online. The collection features a piece based on Abigail De Kosnik's interview with QueenEve focusing on fan activity around and against soaps.

How has the relationship between U.S. soap operas and their fans evolved over time?

Tom Casiello: I honestly think the relationship between the soaps and the fans hasn't changed nearly as much as others believe. (I also think we have to be very careful not to group them all together as "the soap operas." There are currently six U.S. daytime soaps on the air, all of which should have their own individual identity, wherin their fans expect different things from each show.) At its core, the audience still wants stories and characters they can connect with on a human level, mixed with the element of fantasy and escapism they've come to expect. They want to know the characters they've loved their whole lives, whom they've watched grow and evolve, are in capable, trustworthy hands...and they will continue to live on in their homes daily. While audience demograhics may shift, and trends will come and go, strong, long-term serialized storytelling with heart is all the fans have ever wanted.

Roger Newcomb: Obviously, from radio soap operas to present-day television and internet soaps, the way fans view or listen to their soaps has changed tremendously. The relationship the soaps have with fans has evolved as well. Even 30 years ago, the main feedback mechanisms were snail mail and telephone feedback lines. In 2010, fans can email the shows and their networks, and many times the stars themselves. The shows also have Facebook and Twitters accounts to solicit immediate feedback from fans, and the actors themselves directly interact with fans in a more personal way through social networking. It is not clear whether this increased and immediate interaction has impacted storylines or story direction.

QueenEve: I think it used to be a far more personal relationship shared between female multi-generational family members and the soap opera. Over time, with the growth of soap magazines covering more than just "the stories," suddenly we knew about the actors playing the characters and the writers writing the show, making it a little less personal. We learned about the relationships between the actors playing the parts (marriages, divorces, and kids), entirely separate from their parts, and the experience expanded beyond one among just you, your mother, and the story. Then, with the internet, it became even less intimate and much more of a group activity with other viewers. So, what had been something between female members of a family and the soap eventually involved the actors, the writers, the media, and other viewers who may not have viewed the show and characters as you and your family did. The other side of that is that the "family" element has sort of dropped out, and it is no longer a multi-generational female experience. Some of that is the changing role of women in society, but a large part of it is that soaps have backed away from telling multi-generational female stories in search of the almighty 18-49 demo, and the audience loss has reflected that. So, I think it went from a highly personal and intimate experience to a more expansive but impersonal experience such that viewers don't have the investment they once did.

What changes have we seen in recent years in how fans of U.S. daytime dramas connect with one another?

Tom Casiello: The Internet for one - for the first time in history, it's much easier for those with the same interests to connect instantaneously, on a level playing field. Who they are in their lives, where they come from, their education - it's irrelevant on the Web. Here, they are all equal fans, and that has not only helped organize a stronger group effort in their campaigns but also created a world of discussion to bounce their ideas and opinions off of each other in what is hopefully a moderated environment.

Abigail De Kosnik: The most striking fan activity that the Web, and online communities, have brought about (in my view) is that "fans make their own fun," as one of our contributors, Web site moderator "QueenEve," stated. Since fans have started communicating online, they have basically produced their own virtual soap operas - spreading spoilers and dissecting upcoming plots, posting speculations about what's going to happen next as well as (often very thoughtful) analyses of what happened recently on their favorite shows, in addition to gossiping about behind-the-scenes rumors (Which co-stars won't work together? Why did the Exec Producer fire that actor? When is that former writer coming back to this show?). There's also been a level of drama in the wars between fan bases that matches that of the heightened conflicts depicted on soap operas. The animosity that warring fan bases have borne toward one another has been awesome in its fierceness, and, while I don't want to minimize the fact that some people's feelings have probably been deeply hurt by these acrimonious exchanges, I must say that there's an element of watching or participating in soap fans battle online that is immensely engaging and entertaining. I have taken part in some of these "bitchfests" myself (and it's not always fans vs. other fans; it's also fans vs. the shows or the networks or particular storylines), and I'll always remember those impassioned campaigns as really interesting, exciting times of my life. There's something about the dedication and commitment that soap fans have for their shows that really infused the online fan experience with an intensity that many other Internet fan groups lack. It comes, I think, from the fact that, when the Web became a big part of soap fans' lives, many fans had already been engaged with these soap story worlds for years - in many cases, fans' involvement predated the Internet by decades. The Web, which permits for a really wide range of discussions and actions that can be micro-interventions or can go on for months or years, almost seems like it was specifically built as a platform for soap fans, who have decades' worth of information and insight to discuss.

C. Lee Harrington: While soap viewers were among the first groups to migrate to the Net recreationally, as Nancy Baym discussed in Tune In, Log On, they were slower to create the type of user-generated content currently associated with media fandom, in part because the frequency (daily) and longevity (the average age of US soaps is 40 years) of the "primary"' text created less need for viewers to fill narrative gaps in between episodes or installments. Over the past few years, soap fans have become increasingly engaged in vlogs, video-sharing, fan fiction, podcasts, and mash-ups, while much of soap fans' energy remains devoted to the ongoing daily criticism, discussion, and fan activism which takes place in online forums and the blogosphere.

Roger Newcomb: Fans are connecting on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and continue to interact on various message boards. The fans seem to be more tech-savvy these days, so the number of message boards and Facebook pages has grown by leaps and bounds. In some ways, this has splintered the online audience, with more websites and social network sites dedicated to particular actors, characters, or soap couples. We Love Soaps TV receives almost 10 percent of our hits from Twitter and, in many cases, from fans who tweet and re-tweet our features. Twitter has become the fastest way of spreading information about soaps around the web.

Julie Porter: Be careful what you wish for! To me, that's the warning label that should be placed on the desire to raise viewership at any cost. The race for ratings - and ad revenue - has had an unintended consequence along the way: a decrease of conflict in storyline. The intense competition for audience share gives soap viewers a powerful amount of clout in determining how stories are resolved - and, generally, they want favorite characters to be happy, and want to see their characters' conflicts resolved. But is that what they really want? Accelerated storytelling satisfies the short-term viewer but weakens the long-term story. Conflict makes for anxiety, but quick resolutions make for an awfully boring soap, long-term. Once, it might have taken three years to resolve a complex story in a big reveal. That's storytelling. But, these days, if the focus groups say to wrap it up - well, it gets wrapped up quickly, and there's short-term satisfaction but a lot of opportunity for story and character development is lost. Faster-paced storytelling throws characters into a revolving door of reaction; the storyline rules, but deep character development is almost nil. And so the viewer who wanted a quick resolution also quickly loses interest. The willingness of networks to give focus groups and online campaigns a strong role in the decision process also leads to a bad end: It places creative control in the hands of executive management rather than writers, and fan feedback becomes the tail that wags the dog. The soap that has evolved into a marketing tool isn't nearly as satisfying as one that does what soaps were intended to do: explore the feelings and lives of people, and their ups and downs.

QueenEve: I think, in the past, you might have a discussion with a neighbor or friend about the soap or the "girls" in the dorm, but fandom was fairly generic. Now, with the internet, you have both a gathering place and a divisive means of organization. That is, people generally check in on the internet to find fans of the characters or couples they like, to the exclusion of a more general audience. It has led to "board wars" in the past, between couple fans especially. The Sonny & Brenda versus Jax & Brenda fans of the 90s on General Hospital was a good representation of that, as were the Robin & Jason fans versus the Carly & Jason fans. So, on the one hand, the internet allowed fans to find each other on the internet and connect while, on the other hand, it leads to divisive and heated fights.

How do the teams who make these shows take into account the fans' feedback and mindset, from your perspective?

Abigail De Kosnik: I know for a fact that the shows do pay attention to soap fans' feedback, to some extent. The contributors to our book who work in the soap industry verified this, and I have heard soap actors often tell fans who want to see changes on their favorite shows that they must write or call in to the network to voice their opinions. One of my e-mails to ABC, urging them to portray professional women - the female nurses, doctors, lawyers - in a more positive light on General Hospital, got quoted almost verbatim by ABC Daytime exec Brian Frons in an interview he did with one of the soap magazines back in 2003. But, on the other hand, I think many fans, and I am one of them, are frustrated by the fact that, although the Internet permits for a much greater flow of feedback from soap viewers to soaps' producers, the shows don't seem to be able to take effective action in response. Several of our industry contributors have told us that, with soaps, time is a huge factor in this - of course, feedback on a storyline comes in well after months of that story are written and shot - but, also, I wonder if the case of soap operas, in which we see this enormous wave of feedback going to TV shows and not that much difference being made, just illustrates the fact that television is a creative industry and, probably on any television program, whether daytime or prime time or a miniseries, the writers just can't care too much about what the audience thinks about a particular storyline or character. I mean, Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner doesn't think about what fans want, or what they've liked about past episodes, when he puts a new season of Mad Men together, except in the most general way (I think he once mentioned that one reason for an increase in child character Sally Draper's air time was that many viewers relate to Sally the most, she's their "way in" to the show, since they were about Sally's age in Mad Men's time period.). So, maybe the frustration of soap fans is just indicative of the fact that online participation isn't a guarantee that "the people" can influence the power centers that much. The Web gives an illusion of what others have called "participatory democracy," but just sending a bunch of e-mails obviously isn't the way to change the minds of the minority who are the decision-makers. However, I do think that there are probably ways to use online connectivity to influence power centers, both in soap operas and in other arenas, like politics. And maybe soap fans can pioneer ways to use digital technologies to share feedback that really creates change, and then political fans and organizations can learn from those tactics!!!

C. Lee Harrington: From what I can tell, soap opera creators have waffled back and forth on this. The production team rightfully knows a projected story arc in ways viewers do not, and there is a longstanding perspective of "trust us to tell a good story," even when viewers are rejecting what they are seeing daily onscreen. The flip side of that is that, with the instantaneous feedback that the internet allows, production teams (or perhaps network honchos) can get too engaged with daily (or minute-by-minute) viewer reaction and respond accordingly, to the long-term detriment of the narrative. The heated debates about the usage of focus groups in...when did that start in daytime? Late 1990s?...preceded the current tension between short and long-term narrative and industry goals.

Roger Newcomb: I personally think, for the most part, the fan feedback online is disregarded. When there is a huge outrage over something (like the abrupt end of the Kyle and Fish storyline on One Life to Live), the shows and networks take notice, but, even then, it doesn't necessarily change the outcome. In general, there are so many opposing views from fans on storylines that it is difficult to know which is the majority. I've also directly heard from writers and producers of daytime soaps that they believe the online audience does not necessarily reflect the perspective of the total viewing audience, even when the online audience number in thousands, a greater number than a supposedly statistically sound Nielsen sample.

QueenEve: From my experience, they couldn't care less about fans' feedback and mindset unless it feeds their agenda and own personal likes and dislikes. Occassionally, the feedback is strong enough that it can change things, but I have seen more often them using the feedback as a means not to change things but rather to force a story even more firmly down the fans' throats. That is, if some new character is not going over with the fans but the show is highly invested, we'll see even more of the character, and we will get overkill of stories trying to make this character more sympathetic and hearing other well loved characters "pimp" and "prop" the new character endlessly.

How has the trend of an aging soap opera audience impacted the soap opera industry in the U.S.?

Tom Casiello: The networks continue to look for new ways to entice younger viewers to their shows, as they've always felt (with good reason) that these shows survive when passed down from generation to generation. However, I do believe we are seeing the first signs of a possible shift in that thinking. Those audience members over fifty are consuming far more than their counterparts from half a century ago did. Consumers with more income in older demographics are proving to be just as valuable as younger demographics. The key is to find a way to welcome new viewers into the fold while trying not to alienate older viewers...and it's a struggle all the soaps have faced for the last fifteen to twenty years, more so than ever as the generation gap grows wider.

C. Lee Harrington: As my chapter with Denise Brothers suggests, the aging of soap opera audiences had a major impact. The age of all television viewers is going up (as the global population ages), and soap viewership is no exception to this trend. However, the core demographic remains 18-49 year old women, which means soap viewers are rapidly aging out of network priorities. This is visibilized on-screen in terms of which actors/characters are prioritized (with vets moved to window-dressing or dropped from contract to recurring status), as well as the story content itself. The older viewers and actors we spoke with for our study are keenly aware of this trend and believe the genre is suffering for it. If soaps do not respond more fully to the aging of its viewership, an older demographic that is more economically powerful than the industry apparently appreciates, the genre will be in even more trouble than it is now.

Roger Newcomb:Obviously, the aging soap audience is one of the contributors to the decrease in viewers. As longtime fans have passed, they weren't replaced by new fans of the genre. Even though the average age of soap viewers is the mid-50s, the shows have continued to focus on younger characters to a large degree. But there have been some shifts in the past year. Days of Our Lives features more over-50 contract actors today than ever in the history of the show. One Life to Live has recently shifted the focus to the veteran actors on the canvas. There seems to be a better mix between younger and older characters, and this may be due to the networks finally realizing who their audience is.

QueenEve: Not at all. The shows keep trying to write for an audience that isn't there -- 18 - 34 -- and are losing the "aging audience" that they simply do not value. It's insane really, because it's not just the soap opera audience that has aged -- it's all of society now that the baby boomers are aging. Why that audience isn't valued is a mystery to me.

What "surplus audiences" outside the target demographic should soap opera producers be paying attention to? What can they learn from these audiences?

Tom Casiello: Diversity is a major issue daytime needs to address. This isn't just a Caucasian versus African-American issue. In a perfect world, these shows would also represent Latino characters, Asian characters, Jewish characters, homosexuals/bisexuals; there's no end to the types of characters these shows should involve in their long-term stories--while always striving to find a balance between honesty and stereotyping, walking that fine line between truth and cliche. All of these demographics can play vital roles in front-burner stories and can present just as many interesting character dilemmas as a middle-aged, Caucasian, heterosexual character can...probably with an added layer of nuance, an original perspective that puts an entirely new spin on the storyline.

C. Lee Harrington: As I noted above, I believe older viewers should be repositioned from "surplus" to "core," given demographic projections. To engage the US viewing population as fully as possible, soaps would benefit from greater diversity in characters and storytelling overall--more LBGTQ characters, more characters of color and immigrant characters, more characters of lower socio-economic classes etc. There are genre-specific risks to this, of course (I have published several articles on the generic challenges that gay and lesbian characters/stories present to daytime), but narratives that better reflect the US population as a whole may engage a wider audience. I also echo Radha O'Meara's call below for greater attunement to audiences in other parts of the world, given the still-central role that serial narratives play in global import/export patterns. As Denise Bielby and I wrote in Global TV (2008), The Young & the Restless and The Bold & the Beautiful has been particularly smart in writing narratives for multiple geographic/cultural audiences, avoiding lengthy on-screen legal trials and certain types of humorous stories that may be perplexing to non-Americans, for example. I'm not sure the extent to which other programs are following suit, but, if not, they should.

Roger Newcomb: The soaps have targeted women 18-49 and 18-34 for decades. Men make up 20-25% of the total viewing audience, but you do not see commercials for men on any of these shows. African-Americans also make up a large portion of the audience, but characterizations of African-Americans are few and far between on daytime soap operas. Gay audiences, targeted by networks like Bravo, would have been a potential goldmine for soaps, but, with the cancelation of As The World Turns, there is only one regular gay character on daytime now--Bianca on All My Children. Targeting various niche groups would seem to be a more lucrative alternative for soaps than the current one-size-fits-all model.

QueenEve: I think the soaps should go back to the beginning and start writing compelling stories about characters of all ages and stop writing for the "sweeps explosions." I think people like the soap opera genre. If they didn't, the genre's serial aspects would not have been adopted by primetime TV and be so successful there. It's ironic because, as soap operas tried to be more like primetime with big explosions, fights, special effects, and adventure, they became less successful. While, as primetime became more like soap operas with ongoing stories that build throughout a season (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, ER, etc.) they became more successful. Daytime soaps are bleeding viewers not because the soap opera genre is dying but because it is being executed so poorly, compared with primetime TV. People want a better product.

Radha O'Meara: I'm most interested in international surplus audiences for US soap operas, and my contribution to the collection was about the Australian audience for Days of Our Lives. I think that the focus on US audiences for US productions is particularly strong, commercially and critically. If producers and creators give more serious consideration to international soap audiences, they might learn from different strategies and priorities in scheduling, episode duration, and attracting niche audiences, including young people. This might help them to attract greater audiences globally and domestically. I find the strong focus on domestic distribution and audiences for US soap operas in American media studies a little troubling. Although US scholars are cognizant of international distribution and audiences, they seem to maintain a strong emphasis on the US as the principal audience. From an antipodean perspective, it seems American media studies could be more open to the implications of plural global audiences.

Given that many soap operas have long histories with international audiences, there is a wealth of experience and data on which to draw. The broadcast of US soap operas in international markets can highlight the potential of alternatives for scheduling and attracting niche audiences. For example, the most popular US daytime soap opera in Australia is The Bold and the Beautiful. It is broadcast on weekdays on the Ten network in the 4.30 p.m. timeslot. This has allowed the show to garner a significant number of young viewers, who watch it after coming home from the day at primary or high school. Since loyalty to soaps can be so enduring, this early attachment can lead to a lifelong connection. I began watching the show regularly after coming home from high school several decades ago and still enjoy it.

I suspect The Bold and the Beautiful's half-hour format is a significant part of its appeal as the highest-rated U.S. daytime soap in Australia, and indeed the world. This is a contrast to many other US daytime soaps which run for an hour, and particularly those which are screened in Australia (Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital). The half-hour format might be more appealing to Australian viewers, as Australian viewers are more accustomed to popular half-hour soaps made in Australia and Britain, such as Neighbours, Home and Away, Coronation Street, EastEnders. Throughout the long history of US soap operas, program duration has consistently expanded. Early radio and television soaps often ran for 15 minutes, including a single commercial break, but most television soaps expanded in the 1950s to half-hour and later to full hour programs. A few even tried 90 minutes daily. In today's fast-paced world, perhaps US soaps could experiment with episodes of shorter duration. Rather than cancelling soaps with falling ratings, US producers might consider what shorter episodes could do for both international and domestic audiences.

Producers and scholars should consider what makes particular soap operas popular in different regions and the implications this has for definitions of soap opera as a commercially successful genre. Soap opera in the US is much more clearly defined by US programs and by local emphasis on the scheduling and audience distinction between daytime and primetime. These distinctions are much less significant for international viewers. Many Australian soap fans follow daytime and primetime US, UK, and Australian soaps. Despite obvious differences, they often have no trouble grouping them together as soap operas, which share common family traits. In fact, Australian audiences are often unaware of the "original" features used to define programs in the US: US daytime soaps have been broadcast here at midnight, and primetime soaps have been broadcast during the day; daily soaps have been broadcast weekly or bi-weekly, and weekly soaps have been broadcast daily. This means that producers and scholars can learn more about what audiences seek in soaps by exploring broader definitions of the genre and its audiences. According to Christine Geraghty, Australian soaps have influenced British soaps to integrate more male characters, young characters, and "masculine" storylines over the past few decades (Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps, Polity 1991). Perhaps US soaps might also consider such changes.

In my contribution to the collection, I wrote about an unusual rupture in soap opera broadcasting. After screening episodes of NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives in a continuous sequence for over thirty years, in 2004, Australia's Nine Network skipped approximately one thousand episodes. The Nine Network continued to broadcast the program daily, but most Australian viewers missed four years' worth of episodes. An interesting tension arose from this fissure between those who understood the Australian audience as a component of a global, homogenous audience for Days of Our Lives centered on the US, and those who understood the Australian audience as a unique, local experience. Scholars and producers should both consider their positions on this tension. Similarly, this rupture of Days of our Lives for Australian audiences raised questions about the nature of soap audiences' enduring commitment to particular programs. It highlighted how significant parts of the audience seemed to value their own history with and experience of the program more highly than a wider, communal experience. This deeply personal connection is something that producers presumably want to foster, and new distribution methods may impact on these experiences in even more divergent ways. These are some of the lessons US soap opera producers can learn from international audiences, and they may even help them maintain their domestic audiences.

The Survival of Soap Opera (Part Three): New Trends In Production and Distribution

The third section of the The Survival of Soap Opera examines how soap operas have been experimenting with both production and distribution, from new ways of taping and editing soaps to the use of transmedia storytelling. Below, several of the contributors to this part of the book answer some questions about these new trends for daytime dramas. Ernest Alba is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin whose previous work on soap operas can be found at MIT CMS: The American Soap Opera and through the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. He co-authored a piece for the book with Bernard Timberg, entitled "'The Rhetoric of the Camera in Television Soap Opera' Revisited: The Case of General Hospital.

Patrick Erwin is a freelance writer and journalist who has written for the soap opera genre for Marlena De Lacroix's site and at his blog, A Thousand Other Worlds. His essay in the collection is entitled "Guiding Light: Relevance and Renewal in a Changing Genre."

Racquel Gonzales is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Irvine and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Radio-Television-Film Master's program whose research into the soap opera genre includes reception studies of online and offline fan communities and industry history. Her essay in the collection is entitled "From Daytime to Night Shift: Examining the ABC Daytime/SOAPnet Primetime Spin-off Experiment."

Erick Yates Green is an assistant professor of media production in the School of Communication at East Carolina University and a director and cinematographer. His piece in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Production Process of Soap Operas Today."

Deborah Jaramillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University, where her research focuses on television as a complicated collocation of culture, aesthetics, commerce, and politics. Her essay in the book is entitled "It's Not All Talk: Editing and Storytelling in As the World Turns."

Elana Levine is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has written about soap operas in her book Wallowing in Sex as well as in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Flow TV and in the anthologies Beyond Prime Time and Convergence Media History. Her piece in the collection is entitled "'What the hell does TIIC mean?' Online Content and the Struggle to Save the Soaps."

Emma Webb is a doctoral student at the University of Kansas whose work focuses on fan influence and online message boards, including multiple academic projects on U.S. daytime soaps and soap opera fans. Her essay in the book is entitled "The Evolution of the Fan Video and the Influence of YouTube on the Creative Decision-Making Process for Fans."

What do you feel have been some of the most successful or compelling experiments in telling soap opera stories, or distributing that content, in the past few years in the U.S.?

Patrick Erwin: I do think that the Guiding Light experiment I describe in the book was compelling and important. I've said before that it's a case of "the operation was a success, but the patient died." It may have been too much change for an existing show that had a very defined visual palette. But I believe it was incredibly important in terms of defining what's possible. As we move increasing towards narrowcasting on TV and the Web, programming will need to be made on a more economic scale.

Racquel Gonzales: Two experiments I found promising and expanding the possibilities of the medium were the SOAPnet Night Shift series (as I've explored in my contribution to the book) and the popular, nostalgic past episode blocks featured on SOAPnet and most recently on ABC (though their "past" episodes hardly delve into the so-called "golden era" of soap history). These two share a key element crucial for contemporary resonance with audiences: acknowledgment and embrace of a rich soap past. Soap fans, more than any other TV viewer, can have years and even decades of memories with the same storylines, characters, fictional families, and fictional locations. So much soap viewing pleasure comes from those historical and memory ties between the audiences and the soap themselves and our ability to make those complex narrative connections with the texts. When the soap industry can bring about these moments of remembrance, even in experimental ways like the Night Shift spinoff, they can tap into a shared history of viewing and a soap viewer's memory of watching. Of course, this can always create a backlash where, for instance, viewers watching a General Hospital episode from 1996 on SOAPnet lament the good ol' days in comparison with current GH!

Erick Yates Green: The innovative webisode series entitled What If that was aired on ABC.com and SOAPnet.com that brought together central characters from different and established soap operas is innovative. Like previous webseries Imaginary Bitches, Family Dinner, Gotham, and Venice, What If was developed as a series (in this case, 10 webisodes) and was originally aired on July 12, 2010. You can find additional information on the series here and here. Like feature films and TV primetime broadcasting, the world of soap operas distribution is VERY dynamic in our contemporary media playing field. What If, at least, is dealing with the divergent media distribution venues not only with programming that goes first to the web as well as broadcast, BUT, interestingly, as they experiment with divergent distribution, they also experiment with bringing together characters from their different primary shows into an experimental melodramatic melting pot as well.

Deborah Jaramillo: I ran into a great Mexican telenovela this summer on Univision, which, as I sadly noticed at NCA, mass communication scholars continue to forget is a U.S. broadcast network. One of the most amazing things about this novela, Soy Tu Dueña (I Am Your Owner), was that it actually broke into the top 25 broadcast programs in the late summer of 2010. And Univision has recently been beating the English-language broadcast networks in the competition for 18-34 year-olds. Soy Tu Dueña would never have appeared on my radar had it not been for the World Cup in May. Even though the audience for the Mundial is probably more male then female, Univision still promoted the hell out of Soy Tu Dueña during the matches. Soy Tu Dueña features an all-star cast, including Lucero, who sings the title song with Joan Sebastian, and Silvia Piñal, a veteran of Buñuel films ("la primera actriz," the credits boast). Soy Tu Dueña is actually a remake of La Dueña, produced by Televisa in 1995. This was the complete package--pre-sold product, big stars, an excellent theme song--that rode on the coattails of the biggest sports event in the world. Sports...not exactly novela territory. It was a great experiment, and it worked.

Elana Levine: I've seen a few particularly compelling experiments in recent years. One is . While the first season of the series seemed to stretch the GH writing staff too thin and resulted in boring, even unpleasant takes on the daytime program's characters and stories, the second season (which used a new-to-daytime head writer) was truly remarkable. Drawing on GH history by including favorite actors/characters from years past, introducing a diverse array of engaging new characters, and balancing some hospital-centered, more episodic storytelling with serialized tales featuring the core cast, it was a pure pleasure for GH fans and, I believe, would have been enjoyable for new viewers as well. I don't know that it was an economically sustainable project in SOAPnet's eyes, however. In the more promotional realm of webisodes, I have found ABC/SOAPnet's What If... webisodes to be a fun and engaging means of promoting the shows and appealing to viewers. These webisodes feature characters from different ABC soaps encountering one another, allowing fans to see new combinations of characters they know well but think of as existing in separate universes. But perhaps the most significant new development in distributing soap content in recent years is what has come to seem standard practice--the streaming of soap episodes online. Daytime soaps came to this distribution window later than prime time programming, but I believe that increasing viewers' access to the shows serves their continuation well.

What have been the biggest failures?

Ernest Alba: I recently gave a lecture to a classroom of 50 undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin based on the essay by Bernard Timberg and myself in The Survival of Soap Opera. During the discussion, I discovered a few surprising things about young people and their relationship to soap opera - primarily that they think they know all about soap operas, don't like it based on what they know, and they have several misconceptions about them. Based on the discussion of soap opera in that class, I would say that the biggest story is of the failure of soap opera to communicate its value as entertainment to a young audience.

When I posed to them the question, "What are some associations we have with soap people who watch soap operas?" I received several different responses: "Old people," "My grandma and my grandma's friends watch it," "Anyone that has free time during the day watches soaps," and my favorite: "Lonely people watch soaps." This class of mostly freshman students associate soap opera not with their parents but with their grandparents! One student related that she watched them with her mother who watched them to learn English. It is clear that young people associate soap opera with people that they perceive as being diametrically opposed to them in their viewing habits and lifestyles.

Furthermore, it seems that they are confused about what soap opera is and how it can be an enjoyable experience. They seem to believe that soap opera is a less realistic form of storytelling than other television formats, like the primetime drama or the reality show. One student made the audacious claim that House M.D. is a soap opera. Immediately a cacophony of protests rose from the class. The way they distinguished their conceptions of soap opera from House was that House had better acting, less exaggerated plots, Hugh Laurie (a single, strong male lead), more comedy, and other things to draw you in as opposed to "sappy" and "exaggerated" drama. The student finally threw up her hands in defeat and said, "Apparently, a lot of people like House and don't want it to be associated with soap opera." Despite their acknowledgement of the fakeness of television drama in soap operas, they are unwilling to associate their dislike of "fakeness" with their favorite shows, which are also clearly scripted, staged, and unrealistic depictions of reality. It is this attitude of defining soap opera primarily as that which is antithetical to anything they value that allows them to participate in the tradition of denigrating soap opera as a form of entertainment.

If there is one thing that gives me hope, it is that only two students raised their hands when I asked who had never watched an episode of a soap opera. A full quarter (about 13 or 14 people) raised their hands when I asked if they'd regularly watched a soap opera at some point. One student listed four or five soaps she watched regularly when she was younger. The students know that soap opera exists and some understand it quite thoroughly, but many hold common misconceptions about soap opera because it doesn't play a role in their life and plays a role in the life of people they don't consider their peers. They use those misconceptions to further dissuade themselves from watching soap operas.

Patrick Erwin: For me, I think the change in narrative from a more character-based narrative to more of a traditional soap/action adventure hybrid is the biggest failure of the last decade. Even when GH had the Luke and Laura/Ice Princess type of stories, they worked because the narrative was still rooted in the reality of what happened to those people. Soaps have alienated their existing audience and demographic by chasing the youth demographic and have implemented closed-ended storylines that buy short-term attention at the expense of long term fan investment.

Racquel Gonzales: It is difficult to pin these down in a bullet point style, but, broadly, the soap industry has been disconnected with the desires of its audience for a while, and that gap has only gotten wider against the many TV and network changes throughout the 1990s and 2000s. On a very basic level, there are numerous cringeworthy experiments and sensational storylines whose aims were to entice new viewers and keep long-time viewers interested, but their results generated disinterest and audience ire. As a soap fan and scholar, the most disappointing and frustrating failures have been those manipulations of soap history and viewers' investments for quick fixes on ratings because the soap audience investment in these various often fantastic storylines depend on character continuity, recognizable relational ties, and simply a day-to-day viewing that makes sense.

Deborah Jaramillo: With regard to As The World Turns, I was very disappointed with the quicker pace and the elliptical editing that made my program resemble an hour-long drama rather than a soap. I am not against formal experimentation in any genre--my piece in the anthology elaborates on this theme--but much of the pacing and editing decisions seemed to stem from an atmosphere of panic and not from artistry. I constantly complain to my students (especially when they started to get impatient with Lost several seasons back) that no one knows how to appreciate the beauty of serialized programming because no one watches soaps anymore. So many people deride television viewers' short attention spans, but watching an old-school soap opera was a daily exercise in patience. We've lost those conventions that make us wait and anticipate. We've lost process in favor of product, and this has contributed to a spoiled audience.

Elana Levine: As my essay discusses, I think ABC's character blogs revealed a poor understanding of fans' investment in soaps. Because these blogs did not do much to expand or delve into the thoughts and experiences of their character-authors and so rigidly reproduced the preferred meanings of current storylines, they revealed themselves as baldly promotional efforts, with no real interest in exploring show history or character depth.

Emma Webb: The first is not distributing free content online earlier. ABC didn't begin to distribute their soaps this way until 2009, even after they had been making prime-time shows available this way for over a year, and even though many of the networks had been partnering with Hulu since it's inception in 2007. The second is the lack of investment in production of soaps. As Sara Bibel points out in her chapter in the book, as the ad revenue for each soap has gone down, costing-cutting measures like eliminating breakdown writers and the actors' rehearsal time (so that each show can speed taping). This has resulted in a change in what I believe is most critical to soaps: the stories. The stories that now show up on screen often have continuity issues, focus on new characters that the audience does not know (as unknown new actors are significantly cheaper to feature than veteran actors that the audience does know), and actors (based on what has been said at personal appearances) are often confused about the direction of the story and their character's motivation. It is a downward spiral. It appears, based on the rating trends, that, as soaps cut more costs, the quality of each soap goes down, and more viewers tune out, resulting in less ad revenue and more cost cutting.

What lessons can we learn from both these successes and these failures?

Ernest Alba:While I find it encouraging that soap operas like General Hospital and Young and the Restless still have strong ratings, I find it discouraging that old warhorses like Guiding Light and As the World Turns have been cancelled. The biggest failures of soap opera from my perspective are that they have failed to capture a new young audience. It is clear that many students are able to pinpoint some of the strengths of soap opera - emotion, drama, and multi-character narrative structures - but they perceive them as weaknesses. Still, other strengths - longevity of characters and complexity in family structure - are mysteries to them. In our essay for the book, Bernard Timberg discusses the ways in which the camera rhetoric in soaps conveys meaning to an audience. These camera movements and ways of editing and framing a scene are unique to soaps in that they are not the same ones used in serial dramas and do not convey the same meanings. In the way meaning is constructed by the camera, we have argued that soap operas have changed little. But, if the potential audience has changed so much that they are unable to decode the meanings in soaps, it might be time to change the way in which soap opera is filmed and edited so that new audiences who are used to reality shows and documentary-style filmmaking can decode the camera's rhetoric and, if not understand the intended meaning of the narrative, at least understand the intended meaning of the shot. Some experimentation in this vein has obviously already taken place in several soaps, but the traditional way of filming and editing still dominates. My one suggestion is that we must look/research to ensure that audiences still understand how to decode the stylistic conventions of soap opera filmmaking or begin to encode meaning visually in a different way.

Patrick Erwin: I think it's important that serialized storytelling return to basics, whether it's classic TV soaps or new Web soaps. The audience may be smaller, and I don't think we've quite figured out the equation that can make money on the Web, but, again, we need to move from broadcasting to narrowcasting, and soaps need to learn not to try to be everything to everyone....but rather be who they were, and are, proudly.

Racquel Gonzales: It is a difficult road to anticipate the current and future viewing audience, a road soaps have been on since they began on radio. And thinking about what does or doesn't work right now in soaps really sparks wider questions about contemporary TV viewing in general, especially since seriality has been embraced as a potential element of current "quality TV."

Deborah Jaramillo: If soap operas are on their way out--if everyone involved in As The World Turns knew the clock was ticking--why mess with the formula? Why try to attract an audience that isn't going to come? Why not go back to your roots and just celebrate the genre, the form? This is not to say that all changes in soaps happened recently--all genres are static and dynamic--but, if you're going to pander to an audience, pander to the one that's stuck with you across generations.

Elana Levine: The first lesson would be the importance of story, of the writing. The second season of Night Shift worked because it was well written by someone (Sri Rao) who understood the rhythms and appeals of soap narrative and who respected and drew from GH history. This seems an obvious set of principles on which to base soap writing, but, too often these days, the insular community of soap writers ends up failing to take advantage of these core generic traits. The disappointments of the ABC character blogs further enforce this point. I believe that these platforms did not provide the kind of attention to history and the pleasures of soap narrative that they might have, and thus they turned off rather than drew in many viewers.

How has transmedia storytelling impacted the U.S. soap opera (or not)?

Racquel Gonzales: Soaps have been exploring transmedia storytelling for quite a while, particularly in print, with different characters' "diaries" being made available in book form. While these avenues provide alternate revenues, they also create more fragments for audiences to piece together for storyline continuity.

Elana Levine: I don't think transmedia storytelling has had an important role in US daytime soap opera thus far. Most attempts along these lines have been pretty obviously promotional and not particularly interested in expanding or further developing the story worlds in any substantive ways. Perhaps the current format of US daytime soaps demands so much of both the production staff (churning out so many episodes so quickly) and of viewers (watching five broadcast hours a week in most cases) that there is little time or interest in expanding those story worlds in additional ways.

Emma Webb: I think one of the failures of soaps has been the inability to successfully integrate transmedia storytelling into their shows. There have been attempts (as with Robin's blog on General Hospital, as described by Elana Levine), and characters writing books (for example, As the World Turns' Katie Peretti "writing" Oakdale Confidential), but they don't appear to have been successful. This may have been because, as Levine points out in her chapter, often times there is the temptation to move the character's motivation and thoughts from the screen to another other media outlet, leaving viewers frustrated and confused at a character's on screen motivation rather than providing an alternate entry point for lapsed or new viewers. However, while soaps' attempts at transmedia storytelling does not appear to have been successful, fans' attempts at transmedia seems to be more so. For example, in 2005, As the World Turns paired the characters of Lucy and Dusty together, and, in an attempt to help educate potentially new or lapsed viewers, many fans created video synopses of the two characters' history and storyline together. These videos provided an entry point for those viewers who had not been watching the show. And this type of video could provide a way for lapsed or returning viewers to get a recap of a character's storyline which could make it easier to catch-up.

How have alternate distribution outlets changed the way fans find and share U.S. soap opera content?

Racquel Gonzales: YouTube has been an amazing tool to bring together shared viewing memories, though I'm not sure the networks themselves appreciate the site like soap viewers. Moreover, in uploading old VHS recordings of soap edits on YT, soap fans have created an invaluable archival resource for fellow soap viewers and soap scholars. The medium makes it impossible to provide a simple DVD set of a soap. Just imagine how many discs would be required to just capture a month of One Life to Live from 1988. On YT, some of these episodes have been made available by fans for fans, while the comments section provides (as I've said previously) a shared space of viewing memory.

Debrorah Jaramillo: I'm going to continue with the topic of the Mexican novela on U.S. television, not to be stubborn, but because it presents an interesting complication with regard to transmedia fandom. Unless a novela is an original production of a network like Univision, it is being aired in the U.S. after it has completed its run in its country of origin (or it simply could be delayed by a few weeks). In both cases, it becomes nearly impossible to engage with the novela within the transmedia landscape. I'm terrified to search for Soy Tu Dueña online because I don't know if it has actually completed its run in Mexico. I don't want to know what happens, and I don't want to run across fan commentary. My relationship with this novela is completely untouched by the internet and even print magazines. I feel like I'm watching this in the 1980s, even though the image is in beautiful HD.

Emma Webb: Making soaps available online (either through the network's website, YouTube, or other sites) has been the biggest change to the way that fans share soap opera content in the last few years. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, this also means that fans don't need to set their DVRs or watch the show's broadcast in order to keep up with their favorite soap opera. Another interesting development is that, when the content is considered to be bad or uninteresting by a group of fans, fans often ask their fellow fans if "today was worth watching?" And there are alternatives for fans who don't want to sit down and watch an entire episode. If a fan thinks that their favorite soaps are boring but still wish to see select scenes, they can easily go to YouTube and watch the scenes that interest them in what is often 10 minutes or less. With these new distribution outlets, it's even easier for a fan to catch-up if they have become a lapsed viewer. Fans can easily go back and find key moments from a variety of sources. However, this also means that, because this content is available online, fans' attention to detail about individual characters seems to have become more heightened. So, as soaps struggle with diminishing production values as they cut their budgets, the fans are even more likely to notice the slip in production values.

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Four)

An interview with Counteragent.

Counteragent is a vidder who is not only a fan of media sources, but of fandom and its discourses; she describes herself as a "fan of meta and fandom in general." Consequently, Counteragent's vids and artworks tend to be not only about television shows and movies, but about fandom's responses to them. Her vids "Still Alive" and "Destiny Calling" are featured in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: What was your first vid and why did you make it/?

Counteragent: "Copacabana." Because there weren't enough Alias vids, and because I knew Yahtzee would like it.

FC: What do you remember about the experience of making the two vids of yours that are included in the show?

Counteragent: "Still Alive": the agony! The structure was very difficult to craft. I wanted to criticize both the fandom and the show but ultimately wanted to make a vid about empowerment and squee. Finding that balance was really hard for me with the way the song worked. I really owe my betas on this one, especially Giandujakiss.

"Destiny Calling": the desperate feeling of falling in love. I'd just met vidding and I was giddy with the flush of infatuation with the craft, the vids, and the vidders. I was shouting my love from the mountaintops.

FC: Have you seen any of the other vids in DIY program?

Counteragent: Yes, all. I'm a big fan. "I'm On A Boat": Fucking fearless song choice. "Handlebars" is a perfect vid to showcase the power of a vid as critical commentary on the source, especially to nonvidders. Simple but really, really effective. "Women's Work" is an institution. "Origin Stories" was gutsy storytelling both for the source and for the larger cultural commentary. Also a really great use of a tough song. "In Exchange for Your Tomorrows": great abstraction. Is "Piece of me" more RPFiction or cultural commentary? Anyway, it's all good. "How Much is that Geisha in the Window" is scaaaaathing. And I was too dumb to get "Art Bitch" the first time I saw it. Great use of outside graphics.

FC: What's the best/worst thing about vidding?

Counteragent: Worst: the amount of time it takes. That it's perceived as worthless by both people close to me and many cultural commentators. Best: the feeling of squee and empowerment. The community.

An interview with kiki_miserychic.

kiki_miserychic is a prolific vidder known for being experimental and for her use of unusual sources (e.g. movie vids, crossovers, etc.) She was the subject of Bradcpu's first Vidder Profile in August, 2009. Her Star Trek reboot vid "I'm On A Boat" was featured in the 2010 DIY show. The below is an audio interview; click to play!

DIY Media 2010: Fan Vids (Part Three)

Vidders: In Their Own Words Vidding curator Francesca Coppa interviews vidders Giandujakiss, Flummery (Part Three), Counteragent, and kiki_miserychik (Coming next time). Coppa and Stanford's Julie Levin Russo will also be co-editing Transformative Works and Cultures' special issue on remix video: anyone interested in submitting should check out the call for papers.

An interview with Giandujakiss.

Giandujakiss is a prolific vidder who has worked in many fandoms. . Notable vids include "Origin Stories" (2008; submitted for the 2010 DIY festival), "It Depends On What You Pay," (2009; a vid critiquing rape in Dollhouse), and Hourglass (2008; a vid which looks at the Groundhog's Day trope in multiple media.) Her vid "Origin Stories" was included in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: What was your first vid and why did you make it?

GK: My first vid was a Highlander slash vid pairing the characters of Duncan and Methos. I made it because I couldn't not make it. A friend had introduced me to the concept of vidding maybe several months or a year earlier, and suddenly I had all of these ideas and I couldn't get them out of my head - they were driving me crazy. So I finally broke down and figured out just enough of the technical aspects to be able to make my own, very low-tech vid.

FC: What do you remember about the experience of making "Origin Stories"?

GK: "Origin Stories" was unusual for me because it's the most collaborative vid I've made. The idea wasn't mine - it was Thuvia Ptarth's - and she came up with the song and the theme and part of the basic structure. The biggest challenge from my "perspective was to figure out ways to make Thuvia's ideas work visually and be clear to the viewer. And that was particularly difficult because the whole point was that we were focusing on characters who were underrepresented, and so the amount of available footage was limited. I also tried to stretch myself technically; that vid made a bit more use of effects and certain stylized cutting than I'd done before.

FC: What kind of reception did "Origin Stories" get when it was released?

GK: The reception was really positive and really overwhelming. There were so many downloads when I first posted it that it blew my site bandwidth after just a few hours. And lots of people started posting long analyses and thoughts about the vid, which was just amazing. I hadn't anticipated any of that - I'm a Buffy fan, obviously, but I hadn't been all that active in the Buffy fandom community, so I hadn't realized how much of a hunger there was for this kind of critique.

There was another thing that really struck me, though. A little while after the vid was posted, Thuvia posted a short essay about Spike and Robin Wood and why she'd wanted the vid made. The purpose of the essay was to explain where the idea for the vid had come from and what she'd hoped it would convey. That essay got linked by a couple of blogs that were outside our internet fandom circle - I think they were race blogs, or feminist blogs. Anyway, what was striking to me was how those blogs overlooked the vid itself, like, they barely even seemed to understand that Thuvia wasn't just writing an essay about Buffy, but was writing an essay about a vid. It really brought home how difficult the concept of "vids" or "vidding" is to grasp if you're unfamiliar with the form. It wasn't just that they didn't understand the vid - it was that they didn't understand that the vid was the primary document in which the argument about Buffy was being made; the essay was just a supplement.

And I'm not mentioning this because of my vanity :-). I'm mentioning it because it was a really visceral demonstration of how hard it is for people to understand even the idea of "vids" when they haven't seen them before.

FC: Have you seen any of the other vids in DIY 2010 vidding program?

GK: I've seen all of them! Within my particular corner of the internet vidding world, most of these vids are quite justly "famous." I think they're all brilliant in different ways - some are more of an internal analysis or celebration of the source material ("I'm on a Boat", "Handlebars"), others are more political critique of the source ("Women's Work", "How Much is that Geisha"), and Counteragent's, of course, are explicitly celebrations of fandom that are almost divorced from the source itself. I think "Still Alive" in many ways captures my experience of fandom - the television show is just a jumping off point; what I'm really here for is the artwork by other fans.

FC: What are the best and worst things about vidding?

GK: The best is probably the experience of "vid farr" - which most vidders have felt at one time or another. The term is a play on the Star Trek phrase "pon farr," and in vidding, it means you're essentially "in the zone." The clips are coming together the way you want them to, you can see your vid developing as you'd hoped or better than you'd hoped, and it's like a compulsion - you can't stop for anything, not sleep, food, or work.

The worst thing for me are the technical challenges. Figuring out how to get the software to work with the source, and formatting and you're tearing your hair because there's some bug in the program ... it's incredibly frustrating. For some reason, for example, my video editing program has decided to declare war on the .wmv format. I don't know why. It always worked fine before!

An interview with Seah and Margie, aka Flummery.

Seah and Margie have been vidding together as Flummery for ten years. . Among their best-known work is the multimedia vid "Walking On The Ground," which tracks the history of vidding through various times and technologies. "Walking On The Ground" was featured in the 2007 24/7 DIY Show at USC. Their Doctor Who vid "Handlebars" was featured in the 2010 DIY show.

FC: Tell us about your first vid.

Flummery: Our first vid was "Kryptonite", for the tv show Invisible Man. We came up with the idea in 2000, listening to the song and thinking that hey, this would make a great I-Man vid! We did a whole outline on it, complete with complicated POV shifts, and sent it off hopefully to one of our favorite vidders asking if she'd be willing to make it, since neither of us could vid. She said no very kindly and gently, leaving us with no option but to eventually figure out how to do it ourselves. That same vidder flew across the country the next year to help us with some basics, and we plugged away at it for months, finally premiering it at Escapade in February 2002.

FC: What was it like making "Handlebars"?

Flummery: We were vidding this [Doctor Who] live - episodes were still airing right up till our deadline. It made things a little tense, as we had to hope that we could find enough footage to fill in the holes we were leaving along the way. It meant that we redid entire sections a lot more than we were used to, ripping things out to rebuild them from scratch as better footage appeared.

We also weren't at all sure what the reception would be. We'd never done a vid where we so blatantly pointed out the negative aspects of our main character before, and we thought there was a really good chance people would hate it. We spent a lot of time being nervous about how it would play at Vividcon.

FC: How was it received?

Flummery: We were gobsmacked at the reception, which has been almost uniformly positive. This vid has gotten more attention than anything we've ever done. The most interesting part about it is that we get the same reaction from fans who love Ten and fans who hate Ten -- they all think we did a good job of capturing him the way they see him. Which is incredibly cool.

FC: For you, what's the best/worst thing about vidding?

Flummery: The worst thing about vidding is discovering that the perfect clip that you KNOW was somewhere in the source is really only in your head. And clipping in general is just a pain.

The best thing about vidding is having made a vid. And really, the way vidding changes the way you think and see -- it's a real shift, at least if you start out as more verbally oriented, the way both of us did. Learning to think visually, and to tell stories visually, is amazing.

Francesca Coppa is Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College. She is also a founding member of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. Coppa and OTW recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to get a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers like vidders. Coppa also writes about vidding both as a feminist art form and as fair use.